Counterflux
by Mertiya
Summary: In the aftermath of the events of Project Lightning Bug, Ral Zarek isn't quite sure how to feel about the Guildpact. But after a nearly successful assassination attempt, the two of them find themselves stranded on a strange plane, where Ral may discover that his feelings run much deeper than he is willing to admit.
1. Chapter 1

**A/N:** This is not the longest piece of fiction I have written, but it is the longest piece of fanfiction I have ever produced, so please be gentle. It came about after I read Project Lightning Bug and decided I needed a more serious piece of vaguely canon-compliant Zeleren to complement Odds/Ends. In the end, it's probably not entirely canon-compliant anymore (thanks to BFZ), but if you want to squint, it's not so very far away from the realms of possibility. Please R&R and enjoy!

 **Chapter One**

The golden light of the Ravnica's late afternoon sun shone into the office of the Living Guildpact. Although it illuminated a stack of papers about three feet high, it fell short of reaching the Guildpact himself. Jace sighed, rubbing his hand over his eyes with tiredness. Just one more meeting, he reminded himself, and then he could go home and sleep. He ran his finger down the schedule, neatly penned in Lavinia's inimicable handwriting, and just had time to see the letter "R" followed by the letter "Z" when there was an irritable knock on the door.

Jace opened his mouth to say "come in," but before he could get a word out, Ral Zarek slammed the door open and stalked into the office. "Guildpact," he said frostily. So he wasn't 'Jace' today, Jace noticed. He also noticed the hair very gently going up on the back of his neck. Ral was definitely not in a good mood.

"How can I help you, Guildmage Zarek?" he asked.

Ral headed over to the window and stared moodily out. "I have a request," he said.

"I thought you might," Jace responded mildly. "That is why most people ask to meet with me."

"Some idiot in Orzhova didn't fill our last order correctly, and I—and many of the other researchers at Nivix—are desperately short of equipment."

"Hm," said Jace. "Are you here to file a claim against the Orzhov for breach of contract?" _Because if so, you didn't have to bother coming all the way to me._

"I was hoping you might be able to expedite the process," Ral said, with a sideways glance at Jace.

"You want me to order the Orzhov to get you—whatever you need?"

"Well, they're the ones who screwed it up," Ral pointed out petulantly.

Jace rummaged through the notes Lavinia had attached to the summary of this meeting. "According to them, your forms were missing at least three signatures," he said. "I'm not sure there's much I can do."

"I'm not the one who was supposed to sign them," Ral said testily. "I can't help it if Bori Andon is a complete incompetent."

"You are technically listed as the primary contact."

"Well, they didn't contact me to ask about any signatures!"

"They say they did."

"I say they didn't." Ral turned back to Jace. "You're the mediator. So mediate. I was never contacted."

Jace could feel a headache niggling at his temples. "Ral, I am not a miracle-worker. You didn't ask for mediation. You just asked to see me. Privately."

"I thought you might be able to get me my equipment. Given that I had to sacrifice a lot of it on Project Lightning Bug."

"You mean to save your own skin?" Jace asked sweetly.

"Yours too."

"Ral, I can't just—"

"I can't do my experiments, Jace! My brain is trying to claw its way out of my head!" Ral's voice was getting louder, and sparks were beginning to leap from his gauntlet and drop to the floor beneath him.

"I would like to help, I really would, but—" A soft beeping noise interrupted Jace before he could finish his sentence. "What's that?"

"Experimental alarm," Ral said, in a puzzled voice. "It's supposed to detect equipment malfunctions in the lab, but there shouldn't be anything around here for it to detect."

Plucking a small, glowing orb off his belt, he moved around the desk. Jace instinctively began skimming the minds around him to see if something was wrong. He veered away from the tangled knot of equations and electricity that was Ral, and caught the Azorius guard standing at attention outside the door. She didn't seem concerned. Jace cast his net further afield, straining a little, and suddenly brushed against a mind that was nothing but a clear, repetitive line of clanging notes. In confusion, he began to focus, and then Ral's hand came down on his arm, and the Izzet mage was dragging him out of his seat.

"Get down," Ral snapped, pushing Jace toward the ground.

"What—" Jace started to say, and then the world exploded.

There was a horrendous noise, more physical than auditory. A wave of sound clipped Jace's shoulder, sending him spinning backwards toward the wall. He threw up a hand, sending out a gust of wind that barely kept him from slamming into it headfirst. The impact was still enough to jar him for a moment. When his vision cleared, he and Ral were both huddled behind the remains of his desk. Debris was everywhere, and there was a roaring, tinny noise in Jace's ears. Ral opened his mouth in what looked like a groan as he sat up, but Jace couldn't hear it.

 _Are you all right?_ he projected dizzily into Ral's mind. The Izzet mage shook his head slightly, but it turned out to be an attempt to clear it rather than a negation.

 _Fuck_ , Ral replied succinctly. There was blood on his forehead from what looked like a nasty zigzag cut; the flesh around it was already puffy and yellow with bruising. _Sound bomb. Who the fuck is throwing sound bombs—?_

 _You saved my life,_ Jace said stupidly, his head still ringing and disoriented.

 _Jace, dammit, focus. We can deal with—fuck, I_ did _just save your life, didn't I?_

They stared at one another for a long, confused moment, and then the beeping indicator, which Ral was still holding, began to spit out tiny sparks.

 _What does that mean?_ Jace asked with sudden trepidation, but before Ral's mind could form an answer, he risked a quick look up over the remains of the desk. Standing in the doorway was a figure wreathed in crackling electricity, face and features hidden in the amorphous mass. He passed the image to Ral as he sank back down into the relative safety of the remains of the desk.

 _I should be able to handle that,_ Ral said tersely. _I want to get behind it first, though. Care to distract it for me?_

 _I can do that._ Jace crawled carefully around the desk as the figure stalked across the room, then rose quickly and sent out a stinging mental lash as he did so—but instead of the resistance he had expected, he felt nothing. Dizziness surged as if he had taken a step and missed the ground, and he staggered. In the moment it took him to regain his equilibrium, the creature had already crossed the room to him, its hand reaching out and pinning him against the desk. Jace tried to struggle, and then felt the hairs going up on the back of his head again.

There was a crack so loud that it overwhelmed everything else, and a searing flash of light and heat vibrated through him. A moment later, he was on the floor, his ears ringing. Everything around him seemed very still and very hollow. There was no pounding in his ears, no rush of blood, nothing but a terrible quietness and darkness blurring in at the edges of his vision.

 _We have to get out of here_. Jace wasn't certain if it was someone else speaking, or just an echo in his own mind. His lungs felt numb and far away, and the darkness in his vision expanded.

* * *

Ral watched in horror as the attacker slammed Jace into the desk and sent a jolt of electricity directly through the mind mage, who spasmed once and went still. He pulled himself upright and directed the full force of his magic toward the thing. A blast of wind picked it up and drove it through the wall of the office, but Ral was pretty sure it would be back shortly.

They only had one option left. "We have to get out of here," Ral said grimly to Jace, whose eyes were dazed, pupils shuddering around the edges as they tried to focus but could not. "Listen to me, Beleren—Jace. We have to planeswalk." No comprehension dawned in the twitching face. Ral wanted to shake him, wanted to leave him. He could get out of here by himself. This wasn't his problem. The Guildpact might crumble, but the Izzet would endure. Even if they tried to pin Beleren's death on him—and that might have been what they were thinking, judging from their method of attack—they'd have a hard time making it stick, since he would be too far away when the Guildpact was discovered. It was no skin off Ral's nose.

Like this, with the purple bruises already blooming beneath his skin where the lightning had torn through him, Jace looked younger and more vulnerable than Ral had ever seen him.

He grunted angrily. "So help me, Beleren, if you don't walk, I'll bolt you myself."

The wall shuddered, and Jace shut his eyes. For a horrified moment, Ral thought he'd lost consciousness, and then he realized a blue glow was seeping beneath the dark lashes.

Ral reached for the Eternities as well. He didn't have much practice, and he hadn't been off-plane in weeks, but it couldn't be harder than planeswalking while nearly dead from electrocution. As he felt the turmoil of the space-between-space envelop him, he reached over and grasped Jace's wrist. "Stay with me," he said. Jace nodded faintly, and the Eternities took them both.


	2. Chapter 2

**A/N:** In which Jace is cold and in pain, and Ral is definitely, positively, absolutely not concerned.

 **Chapter Two**

They were falling. Ral had never experienced a journey through the Blind Eternities like this one. Worlds seemed to swirl past, and he reached for them, but they slid and spiraled away, and the raw mana tore at his bones, corrosive and agonizing.

Jace's eyes were open again, still straining to focus. From experience, Ral knew he was badly injured, and noticed now, as he hadn't before, the blood beginning to trickle from the burst vessels in the mind mage's eyes. The hand in his was trembling, muscles fluttering like windblown leaves.

"Come on, Jace," Ral said urgently. "We have to get to—somewhere."

Eyes fluttering as well now, Jace managed to nod. His free hand came up to clutch at Ral's shoulder. Dizziness was threatening to overwhelm Ral, but he ground his teeth. If Jace could keep his concentration, then so could he. He reached and wrenched and reached some more and dragged the other planeswalker along and suddenly they were falling through real rain and wind.

They had appeared several feet above the ground. Ral grunted in pain as they landed heavily amid high grass and water. He did not recognize the rolling plains, nor the smudge of dark forest on the horizon. He spared a moment to groan, and then turned his attention to Jace's injuries. The mind mage's eyes were shut, and he had gone limp.

Ral had seen this before; in fact, he had experienced this before, when he was somewhat less adept at controlling the storm. He tore open Jace's shirt front and put a hand on the mindmage's chest, which was still and cold beneath his hand. "Come on," muttered Ral. "Breathe, you idiot."

Jace's heart wasn't beating. Of _course_ his heart wasn't beating. That would be too easy. Ral growled wordlessly and put his hand over the Guildpact's heart. "If I owed you anything after Lightning Bug, I think I've successfully discharged my obligation," he said to the unresponsive mind mage as he delivered a second, more controlled burst of electricity to the other man's system. Jace gasped and bucked beneath his hands, his eyes flying open. They actually were blue, the storm mage noted with some surprise. He would have expected a muddy grey. Blue seemed too elegant for the real Jace.

The mind mage's tearing, ragged breaths were better than silence, but he was still disoriented and clearly in pain. Ral took a look around again. They had literally landed in the middle of a muddy field, with no sign of habitation other than something that might possibly be a smudge of smoke on the horizon. He swore loudly. Stuck on an unfamiliar plane in the middle of nowhere with Jace Beleren. The day could probably get worse, but Ral wasn't sure he wanted to find out how.

And how long would it be before people started realizing they were gone? He looked back at Jace again. "Do you think you can get back to Ravnica?" he asked.

Jace's face was a peculiar grey-white. "No," he said, in a voice that was probably intended to be firm but came out barely more than a whisper. "Sorry, but no."

"Damn useless mind mage," Ral muttered. "What happens when Niv-Mizzet wants to know where the hell I am? What happens when someone needs the Guildpact for something?"

"Oh, yes, it's clearly _my_ fault someone is trying to kill me. Again," Jace snapped back. "Let's see—who else do I know who's done that?"

"Well, this time I saved your life. You are going to owe me big, Beleren."

"After Lightning Bug? I'd say we're pretty much even now."

"Yeah, whatever. Can you stand?"

Jace moved his legs slightly, shut his eyes and breathed heavily. "Give me a minute," he panted. "Krokt, that's painful."

"Sorry, can't do much about the burns," Ral said. As Jace finally pushed himself into a sitting position, grimacing in pain, he added, "I know it hurts," and suddenly wondered why he'd volunteered that particular piece of information.

Jace let out a pained whimper and slowly began to get to his feet, but paused halfway, putting a hand to his head. Ral, hovering awkwardly over him, finally slid an arm underneath Jace's shoulder and around his waist. With both of them working at it, they were able to get Jace into a standing position, but Ral could feel that the mind mage was ready to tip over at any minute. Jace was trembling and breathing heavily, sweat standing out on his forehead and matting his hair.

"There might be civilization that way." Ral indicated the hopeful smudge of smoke on the horizon. As a bonus, the clouds in that direction were thicker, and Ral thought he could see flickers of lightning passing across them. Although perhaps that was less desirable, given their circumstances, than it might have been otherwise.

Jace nodded tightly, staring at his feet. Ral had to admit that the Guildpact didn't lack courage, at least. He would have expected—well, he wasn't sure what. Somehow Jace didn't give the impression of someone who was good at handling pain.

"So," Jace managed as they started forward excruciatingly slowly. "Do you happen to recognize this plane?"

Ral shook his head. "I was going to ask you."

"Somehow, I am not surprised." Jace sighed. "It's that kind of day." He shivered against Ral's arm.

Ral kept a concerned eye on him as they moved. The Guildpact was hunched forward around his chest, his breathing shallow and rapid, and he shuffled rather than walked. Several times, his feet caught in some of the tangled grass, and he nearly fell, but he continued, his lips pressed tightly together.

After about twenty minutes, he spoke again, his voice dull with exhaustion. "Assuming you get your equipment soon, what sort of experiments are you working on?" he asked.

"Uh," said Ral, unprepared for the question. "I mean, Lightning Bug was mostly dismantled, but I think there's still something to be learned from it."

"Tell me. Just—just tell me everything."

"Do you have any idea what you're asking?" Ral asked. Even among the Izzet, there were people who would make excuses when he started talking about his work. "I will never shut up."

Jace gave a tight little nod. "Good," he said. "I need—I need a distraction."

"What, and you think the sound of my voice will be enough? I mean, _I_ agree but—"

"Ral, please," gasped Jace. "Yes, anything. Just—just talk."

Ral looked at him again. His face had grown, if possible, even paler, and his lips were going blue at the edges. "You sure you don't want to talk about something else?" he asked doubtfully.

"You can talk about an—anything you want," said Jace, his voice breaking in the middle of the sentence. "I just thought you'd like to talk about your experiments."

Again, Ral allowed himself a quick, curious glance to the side. Oddly thoughtful of the Guildpact, whether or not he'd intended to be. "Why don't we talk about how much you're going to owe me when I get you back to Ravnica safely?" he asked, patting Jace's waist lightly.

"I can't appeal to your sense of enlightened self-interest?" Jace responded with a small smile.

"Oh, this is above and beyond self-interest," Ral drawled. "Dragging the Guildpact across an unknown plane? This is much more effort than just instating a new one."

Jace made a soft chuffing noise, and for a moment Ral was concerned, before realizing that the Guildpact was laughing. "Ouch," said Jace. "Laughing hurts. All right. So I owe you. What do you want? Me getting your equipment back?"

Ral was vaguely confused to realize that they were—bantering. Almost playfully. And it was almost enjoyable. "Oh no," he said smoothly. "Surely that's the kind of thing you'd do out of the goodness of your heart. You owe me much more than that. I'll have to keep thinking. I haven't come up with a suitable reward yet."

"Just don't stop talking," Jace said.

It was strange to have a captive audience. Ral usually had to fight for listeners—either people weren't interested in the kinds of things he did, or they were too busy trying to get him to listen to _their_ ideas. Or, he supposed, he was fighting to make the Firemind actually consider something, in which case there was nothing comfortable or enjoyable about talking, no matter how much he liked the idea itself. Jace didn't seem to be processing everything, but then he wasn't really processing everything about the surroundings either.

It had been early evening when Ral had arrived in the Guildpact's office, and, from the rapidly fading light, it appeared that time across the two planes was running similarly. Jace didn't comment, and Ral kept talking, but there were longer and longer pauses as Ral had to pay more and more attention to where they were putting their feet as the shadows lengthened. Eventually, after a heartstopping moment when Ral nearly lost his balance and dropped Jace, he stopped and carefully lowered the other man to the ground.

"Unless you think you can get back to Ravnica, we can't keep moving," he said.

"I—" Jace paused. "No. I can't. I'm sorry."

"Well, I can't leave you here. You'll get eaten by a dragon or something."

"They might not even have dragons here."

"Then you'll get eaten by something else, Guildpact. Everything that looks at you wants to kill you."

"Thanks for resisting that temptation, then," Jace said wryly, then let out a soft, sharp sound of pain. "This isn't going to be a pleasant night," he murmured.

Ral sighed. "No, it really isn't," he agreed. "I'll see if I can put together a fire so we don't both freeze to death."

* * *

Jace drowsed, his relatively uninjured side pressed against a rock, as Ral, complaining with every breath, managed to collect some wood and make a fire. Not a very good one, because it smoked horribly and had a tendency to burn out when neither of them were paying attention, but at least Ral could start it again relatively easily and it did make the evening a little warmer and lighter.

Still, it was going to be a cold night. Jace was soon reduced to huddling closer and closer to the fire, wishing strongly for his comfortable bed on Ravnica. When Ral touched him on the shoulder to get his attention, the mind mage whirled with a gasp of pain.

"Not exactly the response I was expecting," Ral said. "Maybe I'd better wrap those burns up. I've got some ointment here that may help a little."

Jace tried to hunch his shoulders down with discomfort, but this turned out to be a mistake. He groaned in pain. "I don't think getting my shirt off his going to be fun."

"Well, Jace, if you feel like planeswalking…"

Jace gave him a glare. "I'd be happy to, if I didn't think I'd end up smeared across the Blind Eternities," he grumbled. "All right." With exaggerated care, he unclasped his cloak and removed it, folding it and setting it beside him, then tried to take off his shirt. His cold fingers scrabbled against the straps, but he couldn't seem to find the coordination to unhook any of them. He stared down in confusion and slowly realized that the image of his hand kept blurring from one to two.

"Beleren, can't you even undress yourself?" Ral asked.

Jace shut his eyes, trying to will them to focus, but when he opened them again, everything had split fuzzily and—it seemed permanently—into two offset pictures. He groaned.

Ral made an irritated noise and knelt in front of him, starting to undo the straps himself. Jace watched him uselessly. Ral's fingers were surprisingly gentle, but even so, Jace had to clench his fists against the pain as the other man actually began to tease the shirt away from the injuries. Once the cloth had been removed, the Izzet mage paused. "Damn," he said, in a tone of voice Jace wasn't certain he could read. He resisted the temptation to peer into the other man's head. Besides, he could hazard a guess as to what Ral had seen. The criss-crossing spiderweb of old, white scars beneath the new, inflamed injury. Jace narrowed his eyes in frustration, almost wishing he'd thought to put up an illusion.

"I had a disagreement with an artificer," he explained, tiredly, then tried to distract Ral. "Is the lightning going to leave a scar as well?"

"Probably," the lightning mage said. He thrust a surprisingly muscular arm into Jace's face, rolling up his sleeve. For the first time, the mind mage had a close view of the dragon winding its way up Ral's arm. At the top of his knuckles, around where the tail began, he realized that the tattoo followed and embellished a feathered white scar, which ran up the lightning mage's arm and disappeared into his shirt beyond the shoulder. "I have more on my back as well," Ral said. "Yours look worse, though. Must have been quite the disagreement."

"I didn't manage to protect him from a dragon," Jace mumbled. The words had slipped out with the memory, and he shook his head to clear it. "Not important," he added. "It was just—something that happened."

There was a long silence. Finally, Ral spoke again. "I'd better clean out the burns," he said.

Wetting the rags in some conjured water, Ral began to carefully clean Jace's injuries. It hurt at first, as he cleaned clinging fabric and sticky fluids off, but eventually, as the twinges became repetitive, Jace found it almost relaxing. Ral's hand on his shoulder, steadying him, as the other hand moved softly and rhythmically across his back and chest. The Guildpact felt his eyes sliding shut of their own accord, and he let out a little breathy noise, half a hum. Ral chuckled. "Enjoying that, Jace?" The use of his first name, tossed flippantly off the Izzet mage's tongue, was unexpected. Although he hadn't been restricting himself to 'Beleren' and 'Guildpact' lately, there was still enough of a pause and a beat before the choice of name, and an inflection on it Jace couldn't identify, for it to send an odd tremor through the mind mage's frame.

"Mmm," Jace murmured. Ral's hands paused suddenly, and Jace yawned. "Don't stop, it's nice," he said sleepily, but the hands moved away.

A chilly breeze sliding down Jace's naked back made him shiver and broke the strange spell. His teeth chattered as he wrapped his arms around himself. "Damn," he managed. "It's going to be a cold night."

"I'll get you wrapped up," said Ral abruptly. He fumbled with a few things at his belt and pulled out a jar of ointment. "Let me just put this on. You can thank me later."

It stank, but Jace didn't complain. The burning pain subsided slightly in the wake of Ral's cool fingers.

"We're going to have to wrap these up with something," Ral said. "Hm," he said speculatively, moving toward the rock Jace had left his cloak on. A spike of absolute panic shot through Jace, and he jumped to his feet, but colored spots swirled in front of his eyes, and the next thing he knew, he was on his hands and knees with Ral saying his name in his ear.

"I'm all right. Just leave my cloak alone," Jace managed.

"You could have just _said_ that," Ral growled. "Instead of getting up and fainting. If I hadn't caught you, you could have gotten dirt into the wounds, and I would have had to start over. Besides, it's the most logical—"

Jace managed a dizzy glare. "Just don't. That cloak has been through more with me than most people."

"Okay, okay." Ral raised his hands. "Don't let me take away your security blanket. I suppose I'll just have to sacrifice my shirt."

"You're wearing something like twelve, aren't you?" Jace asked acidly, but had to put his hand to his aching head, and nearly fell over again. Ral made a disgruntled noise, and helped him back into a sitting position against the rock.

"I wouldn't expect _you_ to understand fashion," the Izzet mage said. "Do you ever change out of that cloak?"

Jace didn't bother answering that, not that he had a good answer anyway. Ral sighed rather theatrically and began to divest himself of one of his outer layers of clothing. After a long moment, during which the sound of tearing cloth filled the air, he knelt beside Jace and began to wind the strips of cloth around him, front and back. His hands were swift and careful, and he seemed to be trying not to tie the bandages too tightly, which Jace appreciated.

It wasn't going to be easy to sleep, but Jace was utterly exhausted, and he'd slept under more painful conditions. "Can you give me my cloak?" he mumbled as he sank down. In fact, he had barely felt its soft weight on his side before the dizziness and the darkness swallowed him.

* * *

Ral stared rather moodily at the fire. He disliked self-analysis, but he couldn't stop wondering about the strange lurching sensation he felt whenever he looked at Jace. He had started off by hating the mind mage and everything he stood for, and even during Project Lightning Bug, he had seen the man as nothing more than a useful ally. That was definitely all. And now they'd spent a two hours together running for their lives and suddenly Ral was feeling— _protective_.

He stared down at Jace's face, relaxed in sleep. The lines that worried at the Guildpact's face during the day were smoothed out in his unconsciousness, and he looked all curves and youthfulness. He was drooling slightly. How old even was he, Ral wondered. Planeswalking had a way of aging a person faster than normal, he'd found.

"I don't like you," Ral said softly, in irritation. He grunted and rearranged himself. "Stop making me like you," he muttered.

He had let the fire burn low so that he could keep his eyes adjusted when it grew really dark, and, in the twilight, other little lights had started to pop up nearby, small glowing insects that lit up, traced their tiny paths in the dark, and vanished again. Ral yawned and rubbed at his eyes: the little motes of light had a vaguely soporific effect. He needed to stay awake.

Jace was going to owe him a lot, he thought groggily. Stuck on this strange plane, sitting out a boring, lonely vigil, just to make sure the Guildpact didn't fall apart again. He didn't even have his coffee with him. Ral dug through his pouch and found a few pills he could take in an emergency, but they always produced uncertain side-effects, and he didn't think a single night without sleep constituted a proper emergency, unless he really started to drift off on a hostile plane full of things trying to eat him.

Something brushed against Ral's leg. He slapped at it, and his hand touched warm flesh. He looked down to see that Jace, who had been several inches away against the rock, had moved in his sleep and was starting to curl against him.

"Oh no," Ral said aloud. "Go sleep on your own side of the rock." He put his hand down to shove Jace away and realized that the mind mage was shivering. "Oh come on," Ral said. "Isn't this what the cloak is for?"

Jace mumbled something under his breath and snuggled closer to him. Ral frowned. He didn't want the Guildpact to freeze or get any sicker than he already was. Well, it looked like he was going to be a pillow tonight in addition to his other duties. Jace slid forward some more until his head was actually resting in Ral's lap. The lightning mage froze, hands in the air, unsure what to do next. Jace sighed, wriggled, and was still.

"Dammit," said Ral. "That's _my_ lap." Eventually, he arranged his hands on top of Jace's head and shoulder, careful to avoid touching his injuries. He half-expected Jace's hair to be greasy, but though it was thin, it was soft to the touch. Ral shifted slightly, spreading the weight more evenly over his legs, and readjusted his position to be less awkward.

As the fireflies swirled about his head, he ran his hand through Jace's hair. It was going to be a long night.

* * *

Jace's head felt light, as if it were going to float away, but there was a weight pressing down on it, grounding him. He opened his eyes slowly, to see bright lights floating overhead. They seemed to rotate and blur in and out of focus as he blinked and shifted.

"Ouch," a voice complained loudly, and Jace realized his head was lying on something warm and covered in cloth.

"Ral?" he said uncertainly. The weight on his head moved abruptly, and Jace wondered vaguely what it could have been.

"You're awake," Ral said flatly.

"Am I?" Jace asked weakly. He blinked. The sky seemed to be moving, the bright lights in it coalescing into strange figures painted across the tapestry of the cosmos.

"You seem to be," answered Ral. "Maybe you could move yourself off my lap now."

"What?" asked Jace. He tried to move his head, but everything shifted dizzyingly, and he gave up unhappily after a moment. There was cloth under his hand, and he moved that instead, trying to figure out what was going on. Another hand clamped down on it almost immediately.

"I don't think we're quite at that stage in our relationship yet, Jace." Jace blinked slowly. Legs. There were legs under him.

"Why am I lying with my head in your lap, Ral?" he asked slowly, oddly pleased to have figured out what was going on, even if he still could not seem to make sense of the strange tableau in the sky.

"I don't know, you did it yourself!" Ral sounded defensive and indignant.

Jace tried to digest this, but he kept getting distracted by the scene above him. A white-clad figure seemed to be arguing with a tall, thin being surrounded by green and blue mist, whose form wavered from female to male and then collapsed into a curling cloud of smoke-like stars. As the man in white stalked angrily toward the horizon, another figure rose from the formless chaos of the night sky. He was strong and bearded, one hand tightening about a patch of rapidly-coalescing light, which spidered outward into a jagged, fractal pattern. Jace's tired gaze was drawn upward and to the twin clouds of purple-grey stars that formed the man's eyes.

The world seemed to invert, and he was hanging in midair, anchored by nothing and yet not falling, as the eyes bored through him. Jace felt the sudden pressure of a whirlwind of thoughts, painful and jagged like the bolt in front of him, rushing into his mind like a fast-moving tempest, bulldozing everything in their path. "Ral—" he tried to gasp, tried to hold onto the sensation of the Izzet mage above-below him, anything, but it was like trying to hold back a glacier.

He felt the weight move back to his head, recognized it with sudden clarity, and managed to hold onto that impression for a moment as the rest of them were stripped away. Nothing but Ral's hand in the darkness and confusion, and then, a heartbeat later, not even that.


	3. Chapter 3

**A/N:** In which Jace spends most of the time unconscious, and Ral mouths off to a god.

 **Chapter Three**

Jace's eyes flared blue for an instant before he went limp in Ral's lap.

"Jace?" Ral said, but there was no reply. "Jace!" Ral's hand went in front of the Guildpact's mouth, and he stared impatiently at the metal of his gauntlet. After a period of time that seemed far too long, a faint mist gathered on the edge, and Ral let himself breathe again. Not dead. He wasn't dead.

Ral looked upward. For the past few hours, he had been enthralled by this plane's strange night-time phenomena, his mind working furiously, trying to decide the likeliest source—a natural extension of mana? An unusual sort of theatrical magic? He didn't really have enough information to come to a conclusion, but he had enjoyed the speculation. Now, however, it was becoming imperative that he understand what was happening.

Clouds were gathering—real clouds, bleeding into the astral formations at the feet of the man holding the lightning bolt. Darkness stirred on the horizon, and the quality of the air changed abruptly. The low-pressure indicator on Ral's gauntlet began to blink. A storm was brewing.

With caution, Ral shifted Jace's unconscious form from his lap so that he could stand. Though he was groggy with lack of sleep, the gathering currents of mana in the air were enough to revive him. Cracking his neck from side to side, he scanned the darkening horizon, and thought he saw movement beneath the flickering clouds.

A few more minutes of straining his eyes confirmed it. A group of people in light, two-wheeled carts was moving rapidly toward him and Jace. Technically, Ral thought, it was possible they meant no harm. However, glancing down at the shivering, unconscious mind mage at his feet, he wasn't exactly eager to believe in their good intentions. Besides, Ral thought with a grin, he'd been wanting a fight for a while now. And if there was a storm following them, so much the better.

Ral steadied himself and began to draw mana as they neared. The leader of the group—a woman in a short tunic embroidered with jagged, fractal patterns—stopped and leaped lightly to the ground in front of him. "Which of you is the oracle?" she asked. "We've come to take him to Keranos."

Ral looked at her. There were another seven or so warriors behind her. Not _great_ odds, but not terrible. He'd been in worse situations. The storm was crackling overhead, and he could feel the mana tingling around him. "We're just travelers," he responded smoothly. "No oracles here."

The woman looked beyond him to Jace's still form, then turned her gaze to the sky. "Oh great Keranos," she said. "Which of these men is your intended vessel?"

Vessel? Ral did not like the sound of that. The form in the sky above wavered and dissolved, and there was a sudden brilliant surge in the fireflies in front of them. When they scattered, a man stood there, clad in a short wrap, a glowing yellow dagger belted at his side. He raised an arm to point at Jace's form, and Ral moved immediately between them. "Don't touch him," he said. "Or you will most definitely regret it."

"Do you not recognize the god Keranos?" demanded the woman.

"Nope," said Ral. He could feel sparks beginning to play lightly across his hand and arm, twining around the scar encompassed by the dragon tattoo.

"Stand aside, mortal, I would speak with my chosen oracle," boomed the so-called god. The wind leapt up as he spoke, and lightning crackled across the sky as he began to step forward, clearly confident that Ral would move.

He didn't. Instead, he reached up and caught Keranos' arm as the other tried to step past. "I said don't touch him," Ral said in his silkiest voice.

Utter incomprehension dawned on Keranos' face. "How _dare_ you?" he demanded.

"It's a talent," grinned Ral. He felt the hairs begin to rise on the back of his neck, and the mana indicator on his glove began erratically spitting sparks. Ral spared a moment to glance down at his instruments. He knew the feeling of an ion trail better than anyone else, and he didn't particularly need another scar. The bolt that was about to strike was going to be large, but, Ral thought, with a grim chuckle, this was his _element_. As the clouds tore open, he reached both hands above his head.

The bolt of lightning turned at right angles halfway down from the sky, and Ral smirked as it struck a high tree about half a mile away. Keranos stepped backward in shock, and Ral began to gather mana to him as the group of warriors began to draw swords, staffs, and bows.

"I am bored," Ral grunted, the mana swirling around his wrist, "I don't like this plane," he continued as he felt the air parting into charged particles around his hand, "and I especially don't like _you_ ," he finished as they surrounded him, then reached up into the roiling storm above him and sent lightning spidering outward toward every single one of them. Thunder rolled, and the flash blinded him, but he was laughing wildly. No damn sleep, no damn safety, no damn anything but the sheer fury of the storm.

At one level, he knew he couldn't keep this up, but for this one moment, in the middle of the chaos and screaming wind and rain, he didn't care. The lightning blurred around him, zigzagging wildly as other mages started to take control of it, and Ral felt sweat beading on his forehead. He'd never tried to take on this many lightning mages before, and it was like playing a very intricate game of catch.

A stray bolt zipped across the back of his neck, and he hissed with pain, turning to try and deflect it, but in doing so, he missed another. There was no pain, but his right leg spasmed and disappeared out from under him, and he fell to one knee in the mud. A sword flashed toward him, but that was just foolish—Ral deflected it clumsily with his gauntlet and then grasped it, sending electricity flooding back up the blade. Its owner fell to the ground without a sound.

A hand touched Ral's neck, and though he turned, raising an arm, it wasn't enough to stave off the jolt that ran through him—not enough to injure, but enough to stun. The ground suddenly moved up to meet his face, and his arms and legs shuddered uncontrollably, but it wasn't as if this kind of thing hadn't happened before. He retained enough control to start moving his hand toward his belt.

"Oh great Keranos," said one of the warriors. "What shall we do with this man?"

"Kill him and bring my oracle to me." Ral's twitching fingers closed around one of the round objects at his belt, and he managed to press down the switch and send it rolling a few yards away. The little light had started to blink. Good. He tucked his chin into his chest and covered his head with his hands.

"What is tha—" Keranos started to say, and the mizzium charge went off. It was mostly light, but there was enough explosive power in it to shake the ground and send a wash of heat over the back of Ral's neck. Having prudently shut his eyes against the flash, he was much better equipped to see than anyone else in the vicinity, but his vision was still green with afterimage.

Stumbling along the ground mostly by instinct, he made it to where Jace's slumped form was resting. "All right, time to get up, Guildpact," he mumbled, reaching down and heaving the blue-clad form over his shoulder. "Dammit, you need to eat less. I never would have thought the Azorius were good at feeding people."

He staggered upright and began to make his way between the crumpled bodies. Several of them had been electrocuted, but a good few others were whimpering and clawing at their eyes. Ral managed a tired smirk as he slogged past them.

 _Just put one foot in front of the other._ Ral repeated the mantra to himself as he forced his aching legs to move. He didn't get very far before his mana-indicator started blinking in warning, and he was forced to jump backward away from yet another small lightning bolt. Forcing his head up, he locked gazes with Keranos. Apparently, the god had not been as adversely affected by the charge as Ral had hoped.

"Give me my oracle," said Keranos.

Lightning crackled across Ral's skin as his instruments began to fail, and he hoped he wasn't roasting Jace alive. "How about no?" he responded. "He's not _your_ oracle. If anything, he's _my_ Guildpact." That sounded—off, but Ral didn't really have time to analyze why.

"You cannot keep this up," Keranos said, and a miniature storm leapt into being around him. "Give up, and I'll let you live."

"Sure you will," Ral said. "And you won't do anything nasty to Jace, either."

"Do you truly not understand the honor that I am offering to your friend?" demanded Keranos angrily. Sparks danced in the air between them.

"All I know is you haven't asked him his opinion on this," growled Ral. "Now go the fuck away. You aren't getting him."

"I see it has to be through your corpse, mortal. Almost regrettable—I've never seen another man with such affinity for the sky's wrath."

"Give it your best shot, if you think you can," snarled Ral, head buzzing with adrenaline, hands still clutched around Jace's back.

He felt the mana rising, intensifying in the air, as Keranos' eyes turned shining gold and the wind whipped up around him. Droplets of rain spattered against Ral's cheeks and chest, and, though he groped for his belt, his hand failed to find anything useful. He gritted his teeth as he tried to suppress the charge building in his torso and limbs, afraid that Jace wouldn't survive another shock. He could feel the mind mage's breath shallow and soft against his ear.

"Pretender Keranos!" called out a new voice. Taking a quick glance around, Ral saw that the two of them had been surrounded. Short, cat-like warriors were rising from the undergrowth. Each one of them held a drawn bow and aimed it steadily. "Leave now!" shouted the one who appeared to be their leader, shorter and stockier than the rest, with daubs of white warpaint on his craggy face.

Keranos chuckled darkly, his voice laced with the crackling noise of lightning running along a metal rod. "You believe your mere weapons can injure me?" he demanded.

"No," said the cat warrior steadily. "I believe our arrows will prove deadly to your oracle before you can kill all of us."

Raw fury boiled up in Ral's stomach, but he held it inside with an effort that left him trembling, sparks cascading down from his hair over his eyes. The air around Keranos ionized in a sudden display of twisting, fleeting electricity, but none of the bolts struck near Ral or any of the new warriors. "This is not over," snarled Keranos, and a sixth sense warned Ral to shut his eyes.

He saw the bolt even through his lids, made diffuse and red by the intervening tissue, but still retaining something of its jagged shape. Despite being prepared, he still winced at the thunderclap and had to try very hard not to fall backward at the resultant wave of sound.

When he opened his eyes, Keranos was gone, but the sky above was boiling with furious storm clouds. Ral shook a fist upwards and shouted, "And stay up there!" before staggering forward a few steps and having to lower Jace back to the ground. Bending over his knees, Ral found himself breathing so hard he was getting dizzy.

A moment later, the cat warriors surrounded them. "Well met, stranger," said the leader. "I have rarely seen such a fine display of courage in the face of one of the pretender gods." He glanced up at the sky. "Still, he has not been driven off forever. We'd best make haste to shelter. If we can offer it to you?"

Ral made a split-second decision. It was the best offer they'd had yet, and Jace was clearly in no condition to planeswalk, nor would he be likely to be again if this kept up. "Thanks," he said shortly. "Yeah."

The warriors moved in, two of them lifting Jace between them.

"Careful," Ral said sharply. "He's injured. Burns on his chest and back."

The warriors nodded, but despite their obvious gentleness, Ral was positive he heard a shift in Jace's breathing, and he didn't like it.

The small group moved off across the stormy plane. Ral was sweating slightly by the time they reached the promised shelter, exhausted from the rough journey and the earlier confrontation, but he tried not to show it. Jace had not recovered consciousness, nor made any sound other than the constant rough, gasping breaths whose unevenness increased as they moved. Ral could feel himself becoming increasingly worried.

Shelter turned out to be a small cave in the hillside, where the group huddled together, staring out at the storm outside. Jace was passed up next to Ral, where he lay against the back wall, breathing heavily, eyes shut. Trails of blood had dried dark brown at the corners of his eyes, and there was a spidery knot of inflamed tissue visible beneath the tattered rags of his shirt.

Ral turned to the leader. "Are we going to be able to get a healer for my friend?" he asked.

"We'll have to wait until the storm clears," the man answered. "But I don't think it will be long now. Keranos will have no taste for spending his strength when he cannot reach us." Ral made a noncommittal noise. He hated the first part of being on a new world, scrabbling for information and trying not to give himself away. Now he was wondering how much of that battle had already been lost during the confrontation with the self-proclaimed god. "So—stranger—" said the man. Ral swore mentally. He had been hoping his question wouldn't start an entire conversation at least. "—where are you from? Two men attracting Keranos' attention in such a dramatic fashion is not a common sight."

"We are travelers from a distant land," Ral said carefully, trying to collect his thoughts enough to go into his usual excuse. "My—friend—and I were attacked by assassins and had to leave quickly. We didn't have much choice about the destination." He hoped the next question would not be _and how exactly did you travel_?

"I am Brimaz," said the other. Ral could not read the expression that crossed the strange face, and he wished abruptly that Jace were in better shape. Having a functional mind mage would have been very useful right about now. "We, the leonin of Oreskos, have sometimes entertained—travelers—such as yourself."

Fuck. Ral was almost sure that was meant, 'we know about planeswalkers, and I strongly suspect you are one.' He hoped it didn't also include, 'and we hate them.'

Brimaz continued. "It seems that we share common goals. I understand you may have secrets that are yours alone, and those I will not pry into. Once the storm has cleared, we will take you and your friend to our encampment and try to heal him. It's good that he's still breathing. I've seen injuries like that on men's bodies before. Many did not survive because their hearts stopped."

Ral glanced over at Jace again. "Thanks," he said gruffly.

The storm only lasted for about another quarter of an hour, for which Ral was thankful. He didn't like the fact that Jace's breathing had changed, nor the fact that dark bruises were beginning to form, not only around the wounds on his chest, but also along his cheeks and throat. They made ready to travel as soon as the clouds had cleared from the sky. Jace was clearly having difficulty breathing by now, and he'd started to moan and thrash as if feverish, though his eyes had opened again, and he seemed to be slightly more conscious of his surroundings than before. Not that that was a high bar.

Fortunately, they didn't have to travel far. After walking for what was probably less than a mile, but seemed much longer, they came to a sprawling cluster of tents across the hillside, where they were met by another group of leonin, most of whom clustered worriedly around Brimaz.

He gave a rapid account of how they had come upon Keranos threatening a pair of travelers. Then he explained how Ral's companion had been badly injured in the storm—which was exactly how Ral had hoped he would explain Jace's injuries—and told the others to take Jace to the healer. They set Jace gently on his feet to take him across the camp, Ral mutely offering him a shoulder. The Living Guildpact took one step, and then Ral felt Jace's legs crumple beneath him. The sudden weight was too much for Ral, who felt himself going down as well. He managed to stop them from crashing into the ground at high speed and lowered Jace the rest of the way. "While it's a lovely sentiment, and I do appreciate you sharing it, maybe you should bring the healer here instead," Ral said, trying to keep the sudden anxiety out of his voice.

Jace's eyes flicked up to his face, and the mind-mage managed a smile. "I think I definitely owe you one now."

"I'll say," Ral responded, as a ripple ran through the leonin, and Brimaz began to call for someone by name, whom he assumed was the healer. "You are going to owe me an absurd amount of equipment when we make it out of here."

"Of course," Jace said, and then erupted into a fit of coughing. Pink spittle dotted his burned chest, and Ral's heart lurched unpleasantly again.

He didn't have much time to concern himself with why that might be when the leonin around them parted to let through a woman who knelt beside Jace. She looked at Ral. "He was struck by lightning?" she asked.

Ral nodded. "I've seen the burn before and the bruising around the burn," he responded, "but I've never seen a bloody cough or bruising on the face."

"What?" said Jace, looking down frantically.

"Lie still, you idiot," Ral said forcefully. "Do you enjoy the sensation of pain? Is that it? I can introduce you to someone who can help you out with that, if you'd like."

The healer bent over Jace, her eyes and hands glowing slightly white. The Guildpact let out a soft sigh as her hands played across his chest, head tipping back slightly at the release of pain. For a moment, Ral found himself captivated by the other's position, the half-open shirt, the gaping mouth, the tension starting to seep out of the shoulders—it all suggested a very different scene than the one actually presented here. He shook off the odd impression, focusing on the sound of Jace's breathing beginning to come more easily.

"Fluid in the lungs," the healer said succinctly, breaking the peculiar silence. "He'll need rest for a few days, but I can heal most of this. I'm afraid the burns will leave a scar. Better watch his heart as well, it seems to have taken quite a shock. And there's something I don't like about the facial bruising. I want to keep an eye on him."

"I need to get back to—" Jace started.

"—where we came from," Ral put in hurriedly, not sure how lucid the Guildpact was right now. "You also need to not be dying."

"I'm not dying," Jace muttered. "I'm just slightly impaired." But he let the healer work on him, and then let Ral and the healer helped him carefully to his feet and walk him over to a tent the other leonin had been busily clearing out. Jace let out a grateful sigh as he was lowered onto the pallet, his eyes fluttering closed almost immediately.

"Your lover needs rest," the healer told Ral firmly, steering him out of the tent. "You can see him later."

It took a moment for the statement to sink in. "L-Lover?" sputtered Ral in consternation.


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary:** In which Ral attempts to get breakfast, Jace manages to spend a little time awake, and sparks fly.

 **A/N:** Many thanks to Rastaban for discussions involving headcanons about Ral's past.

 **Chapter Four**

Bright light speared through Ral's eyelids, and he groaned. Morning already. Judging from the dryness of his mouth and the stickiness of his tongue, he'd fallen asleep in the lab again, but he couldn't remember what he'd been working on. And judging from the fact that everything was hurting and there was a familiar smell of faint burning hanging around his hair, it had something to do with lightning.

He blinked his eyes several times, trying to clear out the gunk, then realized that instead of the familiar sight of his grubby desk or floor, he was staring at yellow, flattened grass. What?

Ral sat up hurriedly, finally remembering where he was as he saw the inside of the sturdy tent and the thin bedroll he had been sleeping in. "Goddammit," he said aloud helplessly. After the healer had spirited Jace away last night, Ral himself had been too tired to do anything more than acquiesce when Brimaz offered him a place to sleep. Now, he was hungry and uneasy, but one of those was more easily dealt with than the other.

Getting unsteadily to his feet, Ral looked sadly down at his outfit. His once—well, not pristine—but mostly oil-free clothing was ripped and shredded, covered in burn marks and grass stains. It was also rumpled, but then it almost certainly had been rumpled to begin with.

Yawning, he made his way out of the tent and was arrested by the smell of sizzling meat. His stomach climbed up his throat into his brain and demanded immediate attention. Rubbing a hand through his hair, he headed in the direction of the smell, which turned out to be emanating from a fire a few tents down, where a small cat person was carefully frying a number of long strips of what looked like bacon.

"Can I have some of that?" Ral asked.

She? He? They? turned around and looked at him sternly. "Who are you?"

"Very hungry," Ral answered. "Can I have some food?"

"I'm supposed to be making breakfast for me and my brothers," the child responded. "You aren't any of those people."

Ral's eyes slid across to the meat, and his stomach growled loudly. "I could try being your brother," he suggested. "Don't you people have blood brothers or something?"

The child continued to stare at him. "I don't know what you mean, but I'm pretty sure you're not even a leonin."

Ral was starting to get slightly desperate. "Look, kid," he said. "I'm a guest of—honor—" sure, close enough "—here and I'm also really hungry. Let me have some of that." He reached forward, but the child jerked back, and Ral had to stop, for fear that she would let the meat fall into the fire, and he didn't think he could handle that without breaking down. It had been a bad few days.

The small child put hands on hips and hissed, puffing out the fur around their neck and getting right into Ral's path. Suddenly, as they peered into his face, the golden eyes widened. "You're the storm man!" the child said.

"Er," said Ral. "Yeaaaah. How'd you know?"

"I saw you last night!"

Ral stared. "You what?"

"You were in the sky! You stood up to Keranos! It was fantastic!"

Ral's eyes narrowed. What the fuck was wrong with this plane? Whatever, maybe this would give him a way to get food. "So that means you think I'm pretty great, right?"

"Yeah!"

"So how about giving me some of that food?" he asked, trying his best to sound wheedling and enticing. He wasn't certain it came out well. He didn't exactly have a lot of experience dealing with children.

The child looked speculative, and Ral was beginning to feel hopeful when they spoke up again. "Show me."

He groaned. "What?"

"Show me. I want to see your storm magic. If you show me your storm magic, I'll give you some of this."

He had to give them credit for guts, despite being irritated by it. "Promise you'll give me some food?" The child nodded. "As much as I want?"

"You can't have more than half of it."

"You drive a hard bargain. Okay, it's a deal." Ral held his hand up in a fist in front of their face and once he was sure he had their attention, opened it dramatically in a burst of electricity. Sparks surged along his fingertips, one of them jumping to the child's nose. They sneezed and jumped back, all their fur puffing up suddenly.

"Careful!" Ral exclaimed, reaching out to steady the meat, which was starting to wobble wildly.

"That was so amazing!" squeaked the child. "Show me again!"

"Not before I've eaten something," Ral grunted. "I can't do tricks on an empty stomach."

"Don't eat more than half," the child cautioned again, as they took the pan away from the fire, scraped the bacon off onto a plank off wood, and handed it to Ral. He immediately started shoveling food into his mouth. "Ouch," he mumbled as he burned his tongue, but he was too hungry to stop.

It took about three minutes to finish, because he forced himself to slow down after nearly choking on the first few gulps, and he had to make sure not to eat more than half, which would have been all too easy. Sadly, licking the last of the grease off his fingers, he looked up to give the plate back to the child—and blinked. His vision appeared to have quintupled.

There were now five small cats standing in a semi-circle in front of him. "These are my brothers," said the one in the middle, whom he recognized after a moment as the first one he'd met. "And my best friend. Can you do more tricks?"

Ral looked around the little circle. "Can I have more food?"

* * *

Breathing hurt. So, as Jace discovered in the next second, did moving. He couldn't even whimper without it hurting. So, instead, he lay and blinked, trying to figure out what was going on. His memories from the previous day were blurred and disjointed—a few images of a sky bright with starry pictures, a lot of lightning, and a large amount of Ral Zarek.

Surprising, Jace thought, how comforting it was to flip through those particular memories. He wouldn't have expected to enjoy anything about spending time with Ral, and certainly the previous day had been a whirlwind of pain and misery, but there were some highlights. Ral's angry insistence that Jace was going to owe him big _when_ they got back, his surprising protectiveness, and—his hands on Jace's back, calloused and scarred but so incredibly gentle. In the light of morning, with his head a little clearer, Jace wondered about his reaction to those hands. It was almost as if—

"Where in Krokt's name is the healer?" Apparently, thinking about Ral had summoned him. The Izzet mage poked his head into the tent for a moment and then pushed his way in. "Are you feeling all right, Jace?"

"That depends," Jace croaked, wincing. "Does feeling as if I've been trampled by a horde of Gruul count as 'all right'?"

"What's a Gruul?" piped up a small voice, and Jace realized they weren't alone. A small feline creature was peering around Ral's leg. "Can we come in, Zarek?"

"Don't touch my friend," Ral instructed sternly. "He's hurt. Jace, do you, uh, mind?"

Jace blinked. Three more heads appeared to Ral's right. "No?" he said uncertainly. "Who are these?"

Ral seemed slightly embarrassed. "They're just some kids," he mumbled. "They gave me breakfast and now they won't leave."

Six—no eight—small cat-like creatures filtered slowly into the tent around Ral's legs. Jace stared at them, wondering for a moment why they looked so—puffy. It wasn't until a spark flew off the one on the end that he realized and started laughing wildly.

Laughing was painful, but he couldn't stop. He curled up on his side in the bed and howled, covering his mouth with his hand, tears springing to his eyes.

"Jace?" Ral said uncertainly. "Are you all right?"

Jace turned to him weakly, and realized that the Izzet mage hadn't been able to tell he was laughing, because a look of concern slipped off his face to be replaced with a defensive scowl. "You—you—made them puffballs!" was all Jace could manage to say.

"All I did was show them some lightning magic!" Ral protested. "It's not my fault if their fur is—responsive."

"Ouch," Jace managed. Every time he tried to stop, he looked up and saw the confused expressions on the small cat's faces, and he started convulsing again. It was agonizing. "Oh, Krokt, Ral, _why_?"

"I wanted them to get me breakfast!" Ral protested.

"What's so funny?" asked one of the kittens.

"Nothing," grunted Ral. He turned back to Jace. "I'm glad to see that _you're_ feeling—" he broke off.

"What?" Jace asked, but Ral didn't answer. Instead, he hurried to the bed and leaned toward Jace, who instinctively started to lean away and then stopped at the first twinge of pain through his stomach and chest. "Ral—"

"Hold still," the lightning mage instructed, taking Jace's face gently with one hand and tipping it first to one side and then the other.

"You are making me dizzy," Jace complained. "What is it?"

Ral turned back to the circle of kittens. "I thought you said you saw the healer in here."

"We did," answered the first one. "I don't know where she is now, but a lot of the grown-ups are having a council, so she probably had to go too."

"Why is he still bruised?" demanded Ral.

"I am?" Jace asked.

"Yes," Ral said shortly. "And as far as I know, bruises aren't exactly difficult to heal."

He traced a finger lightly down the side of Jace's face, and Jace pulled away. "Ouch, that hurts," he said, as pain twisted down in the wake of Ral's touch.

"See?" Ral said in frustration.

"Well, don't blame me," Jace responded testily. "I'm not the healer. And I'm still exhausted, so maybe you should be letting me rest."

"Are you the oracle?" put in one of the kittens, apparently to him.

"What?" Jace asked in confusion.

"He's not an oracle," Ral said irritably. "He's just a nuisance."

"Thanks," muttered Jace.

Ral gave him a glare. "You're not important," he said flatly. "Not in an objective sense, I mean. Obviously, we are-" he made a face, "- _friends_."

 _You know,_ Jace thought tiredly. _Instead of trying to send me obscure hints about what's going on, you could just tell me. In my head._

It was interesting to watch the sparks burst across Ral's back and play down his sides. The kittens gave out a long, collective, "oooooooh," as Ral's angry voice echoed in Jace's mind. _I thought I told you to stay out of my head, Beleren._

 _I'm not reading your mind, I'm just—sending and receiving,_ Jace thought.

 _Close enough_ , growled Ral. _I don't like you being in here._

 _Well, I don't like being injured and stuck on an unknown plane with no one_ telling _me anything!_ Jace snapped back. _It looks like we'll both just have to deal with things we don't like, doesn't it?_

Ral sighed loudly and sat on the floor beside the pallet Jace was on. "Kids, go get the healer, will you?" he asked. "I'd like to talk to my friend alone."

The one in the front gave out a small, excited squeak, and then nodded. "Come on," she said to the others. "They want some time _alone_."

Jace watched them file out with some bemusement. "What was that about?" he asked.

Ral coughed. "No idea," he said immediately, and Jace gave him a skeptical look. "Okay, I may have an idea, but it's stupid," Ral continued. "They may not have entirely absorbed my denial yesterday."

"Denial?"

"The, er, the rest of the camp seemed to think that you and I were—more than friends."

"What?" asked Jace. Then, as he realized what Ral was driving at, "Oh! _Oh_." He laughed. "You must have been acting worried."

Ral sniffed. "I was concerned about the incarnation of law and order on my home plane, that's all."

Jace chuckled, which hurt his ribs again, and then asked again, "Ral, can you tell me what has been going on? My memories of yesterday are—fragmented."

"Someone tried to kill you and I got caught up in it," Ral responded grouchily.

"Yes, okay, I remember that part. What happened after I fell asleep? I—" Jace frowned. He had a vague memory of Ral's hand on his head and of someone—coming down from the sky? "I woke up, and you were—"

"Some asshole showed up calling himself a god," Ral cut in a little faster than Jace would have expected. "Said he wanted you to be his oracle. I told him no."

"Did your manner of communicating involve lightning?"

"It may have."

"How did that go?"

"Twelve against one? Not bad. Had to use up one of my mizzium charges, though, and we were in a slightly suboptimal situation when these cat-folk showed up and threatened to kill you."

"Wait—what?"

Ral waved a hand. "Long story. Anyways, they brought us back here and healed you up, and that's about it for yesterday."

Jace rubbed his forehead, then regretted having done so. The flesh was distressingly tender to the touch.

"So," Ral continued. "Do you think you're ready to leave yet?"

Jace opened his mouth to say 'probably', when a wave of dizziness washed across him, and he thought better of it. Though he felt better than he had the previous day, his limbs were oddly heavy, and his head was oddly light. He groaned. "I'm not sure," he said.

"Goddammit, Beleren, _be_ sure. Do you have any idea how frantic Ravnica will be? Not to mention how in the name of the Multiverse I'm going to explain my absence to the Firemind."

Jace glared at him tiredly. "If you're so concerned about Niv-Mizzet's attention, then just go back yourself!"

Ral glared back, sparks rising from his hair and spilling over his face again, as electricity crackled across his chest. Despite his frustration, Jace was intrigued. He was sure he'd never seen Ral produce this much electricity, and he wondered if the lightning mage was losing control of himself as he tired. It hadn't occurred to him that Ral might have to expend energy to _avoid_ shocking everything in sight. "I can't exactly abandon the Guildpact on a strange plane with no one else," hissed Ral. "I care about Ravnica, even if you don't."

"I also care about Ravnica," Jace gritted out between his teeth. "I just don't see how having you around and raising my blood pressure is going to improve my condition."

There was a mini-thunderclap as a small bolt of lightning shot out and struck one of the tent-poles. Ral shook himself in irritation, and one hand leapt to his belt, apparently adjusting one of the innumerable dials and gears he kept there. "Just rest, will you? I need you to improve so we can get ba—"

"I'm not interrupting anything, am I?" The tent flap opened to let in the healer from the previous day, a tall cat woman whose white fur was dappled with brown across her eyes and mouth. The kittens milled in with her.

"Nothing at all," Jace assured her, heading off whatever less-polite thing Ral had been about to say.

"Good morning, both of you. Zarek, the council would like a word with you, if you don't mind."

Ral mumbled something that was probably rude but at least unintelligible and got to his feet. "What's wrong with Jace?" he asked, as he paused in the entryway of the tent.

The healer knelt beside Jace. "The burns—"

"Why is he bruised?" Ral cut in. "Where are those coming from?"

"I'm going to investigate that now," the healer said calmly. "I'll let you know what I find out."

Ral made another indescribable noise and stalked out of the tent. The healer bent over Jace.

"I am Xenia," she said. "I'm afraid you were in no condition for me to introduce myself yesterday."

"Jace," Jace responded uneasily, hoping Ral hadn't given another name, then realizing she had called Ral 'Zarek'. Well—that was just too bad, either way. She didn't seem particularly confused.

"How are you feeling, Jace?" Xenia asked.

"In pain," he answered, wincing. "Breathing hurts. So does talking." In fact, he would much prefer to speak with his mind, but he didn't quite dare without knowing more about the plane he was on.

Xenia made a sympathetic noise. "I can probably help with some of the pain," she said. "But I've been trying to get rid of the bruises since last night, and they keep coming back. How were you injured?"

"It's all a little hazy," Jace temporized, and stretched out briefly to skim the top of her mind for information that he might be able to use, wishing that Ral hadn't left so suddenly. It was going to be difficult to coordinate, and even the mild effort he needed to peer through Xenia's surface thoughts made him dizzy. "I was attacked and the attacker sent a bolt of lightning through my chest—I remember that."

"Do you remember anything about the attacker? Or any more about the attack itself?"

Jace tried to shake his head wearily, and then gave up, as the room seemed to rotate over his head, and he had to fight the urge to vomit. "Not much. Just—someone holding me down and then a lot of pain."

"So they actually touched your skin to apply the shock?"

"Yes," Jace confirmed.

"Hm," Xenia said. Her soft, fuzzy hands moved gently over his skin, trailing blessed coolness and relief of pain in their wake. "Do you mind if I reexamine the initial injury?"

"No, that's all right," Jace said.

The places where her hands had stopped touching had already begun to hurt again.

* * *

The meeting, to which the kittens had led Ral, had already gone on far longer than he felt it ought to have. None of it was particularly interesting, since most of it was Brimaz and the other cat folk—leonin, wasn't that the word they'd used?—going on and on about things Ral didn't understand because he had been on the plane for less than forty-eight hours.

"Zarek? What do you think?"

"Uh?" said Ral, looking up quickly from bouncing a small ball of electricity back and forth from hand to hand.

"Did you hear what I said?"

"Yes, of course," Ral lied.

Brimaz fixed him with what he thought was probably a skeptical stare, but wasn't sure because he had no idea how to read a leonin's facial expression. "Do you think that such a thing is within your power?"

Ral blinked slowly. "Ah," he said.

Brimaz sighed. "In case you were distracted," he said pointedly, "I was wondering whether you thought it would be possible to teach the rudiments of your craft to some of my people."

"Well," said Ral. "It might be difficult. It's not something everyone is good at—"

As if on cue, three of the kittens raced past the tent, giggling and shooting sparks at one another from the ends of their fingers. Ral watched them go rather moodily.

"If you would at least consent to try, I would appreciate it," Brimaz said, sounding amused.

"All right," grumbled Ral. After all, they would be leaving in a few days. It didn't really matter what knowledge he gave out; it wasn't as if he planned to return.

"There is another matter that I wanted to discuss with you," the leonin king continued smoothly. "You say you are travelers from a far distance. We have met such travelers before."

 _Fuck_ , Ral thought, once again cursing whoever had decided to try to remove the Guildpact. He was almost certain they had been trying to frame him for the assassination, which made it even worse. Talk about unsportsmanlike conduct. "You have?" he prodded.

Brimaz nodded, and another one of the leonine put in, "Though kind, they were powerful and dangerous. They have shaped the course of this world and shown those who did not know the truth of our so-called gods."

 _Goddamn show-offs_ , Ral thought in frustration. "My companion and I are just trying to get home," he said. "Falling in with you was a complete accident."

"Yes, so you have intimated," said Brimaz. "And I have no doubt you're telling me the truth. We also have no desire to interfere with you or your—companion."

Ral's frowned deepened at the pause. Surely they'd believed him when he said he and Jace weren't lovers? Why would they have come to that conclusion anyway? He barely tolerated the Guildpact. Just because they had once had a single pleasant interaction didn't mean Ral was pining for him, the Izzet mage thought grumpily.

Brimaz sighed and looked at him. "The followers of Keranos desire your companion as their oracle, and I believe they fear you could unseat the gods themselves."

"I really don't see how Jace or I could unseat gods," Ral protested uncomfortably.

"Don't you?" This time the leonin king was the one to give Ral a sidelong glance. "You have shown yourself capable of standing up to Keranos himself. And there is much speculation about why Keranos desired your companion so strongly—among us, and, I have no doubt, among his followers."

Ral stared blandly back. "Jace is good at annoying people, that's about it," he said. Whether or not he liked the Guildpact, there was no need for everyone to know about Jace's mental powers.

Brimaz nodded, and once again Ral wished that either the leonin had more human-like faces, or that Jace himself wasn't incapacitated. It was too difficult to tell what the other creatures were thinking.

"We're grateful for you helping Jace," Ral said. "But we'll be moving on and out of your," he smirked, "fur as soon as he's capable of travel."

"Is it possible you might consider an alliance?"

"What kind of alliance?" Ral asked suspiciously.

"You hold the power to be a strong force for good here," Brimaz said. "As does your companion."

"Look," Ral said. "I don't want to get involved in local politics."

"I'd say you already are," Brimaz pointed out, and when Ral grunted in acknowledgment, continued. "We have helped you a great deal, Zarek. We don't begrudge this, and we will not beholden you. We simply ask that you remember this."

Ral groaned. The last thing he wanted to do was be swept up into a petty feud that didn't concern him. On the other hand, it didn't seem like a good idea to alienate their benefactors. "Okay," he said. Besides, they would be able to leave soon. "How can I help?"

* * *

Jace slept fitfully, fading in and out of consciousness. After Xenia had finished examining him, she had made several noncommittal noises and then told him to try to sleep and not to worry. Jace, decidedly unconvinced, had reached into her head and snagged the concerned uncertainty along with the whisper of _strange poison,_ and promptly wished he hadn't.

Finally, he hiked up the simple shirt they had put him in and stared down at his chest. The burn had faded from red to pale whitish-pink in the wake of the healing magic, but one spot in the center was dark blue-red and swollen around a small cut that didn't seem to have healed at all. It was slowly leaking clear fluid. Jace shuddered, pulling the shirt back down and lying down with a sigh.

He forced himself back to sleep when he could, but his dreams were dark and muddled, and he wondered if he was actually accomplishing anything. He needed to get better. Ravnica was depending on him. Lavinia would be frantic by now—Emmara might have noticed his absence as well. Why wasn't the healer doing a better job? Should he tell Ral?

The tent flap opened, and the object of his consideration whirled in, carrying with him a fizzing cloud of angry sparks.

"I hate this plane," Ral complained. "I hate everything about it. There is no coffee, and there is no lab, and there is no civilization and everything. Is. POLITICS!" Lightning arced from his back to his hand, and Jace felt guilt twisting up along his insides. No, he wouldn't tell Ral. The Izzet mage had enough to worry about right now without him adding to it. He just needed rest.

"Argh," Ral said out loud before slumping down next to the bed. "How are _you_ feeling? Better? Can I go home now?"

Jace tried to sit up, and a rush of dizziness washed over him. "I think I need some more rest," he said apologetically, and Ral groaned.

"How much sleep can one man possibly need?" he grumbled. "All right, but you owe me a head if Niv eats mine."

"It'll be credited to your account in the event of any unforeseen accidents." Jace managed a smile.

"Where is the healer?" Ral asked, staring around the tent.

"I've been sleeping on and off, what time is it?"

"Evening," the Izzet mage groaned. "I spent all day talking to people and trying to teach them storm magic. These chucklefucks wouldn't know a lightning bolt if it struck them in the face—which, come to think of it, I could probably get away with…" He paused meditatively. "What do you think, Jace?"

"I think that's a terrible idea," Jace said weakly.

"Yeah, probably," Ral said. "Don't want to get us kicked out of here before you feel better. It would probably take even _longer_ to get back." That hadn't been exactly what Jace was getting at, but he'd take it. Ral's voice was tired and frustrated, and he was drooping slightly. "At least one of the kittens was doing a good job. The one who gave me breakfast. She's smart. Prime Izzet material. Kept shocking her friends' tails when they weren't looking."

"Glad it wasn't a total waste," was all Jace could think of to say. The room had started gently revolving again.

"You," said Ral, "should be sleeping. I'll stay with you. They'll get another pallet in here for me if I ask, and then you won't have to wake up to deal with the healer."

"You don't have to do that," Jace murmured.

"Yeah, well." Ral paused. "Somebody has to make sure the incarnation of Ravnican law and order doesn't die in his sleep."

"Thanks." Jace reached out, trying to catch the other man's wrist and squeeze, but his hand landed loosely on top of Ral's instead. The last thing he felt before the darkness closed over his head was a rough squeeze.

* * *

He stared down at the woman sprawled languidly across the bed, almost unsure what to do.

"Like what you see?" she asked. He did. His eyes couldn't stop tracing across her form, drawn from thigh to shoulder to—other places in between. But there was something very off-putting about the intricate, curling tattoos that covered her from head to foot. He had seen them lit up from within with purple fire, but now they were quiescent, only the depths glimmering faintly. "Come here," she ordered, and he did so, not as quickly as he thought she'd expected, but clumsily lowering himself onto the bed. One hand landed on her face, and he had to tell himself, oddly, not to flinch. Her hand reached up to brush his cheek, and he made a noise in his throat and moved forward to kiss her.

Her lips were warm beneath his, and for a moment, he was lost in the sensation of moving against her. Then something purple glittered in his side vision, and he pulled back to see that the tattoos were moving, sliding from her cheek onto his hand. He stared at them and tried to sit up, his heart thumping unpleasantly in his chest.

The purple lines shifted again, and he looked down to see her etchings rearing up like snakes from within her skin, grasping at his arms and pulling him downward toward her, but her face had been replaced with nothing but a strange, blank mound of flesh.

He screamed, struggling against the bonds that forced him down, heard a cold voice murmuring somewhere above his head, but he could not understand the words. A blade skimmed across his back, not penetrating it, just caressing him with its cold touch. Sickness slewed dizzy up his body in its wake, and he was falling, the ground below him surging up.

Before he could strike it, his mind pulled him back onto the rooftop, the storm crackling around his head. The boy standing in front of him shoved a rough wooden club beneath his chin. "Do you really think anyone will miss the rain mage?" the boy asked mockingly.

His feet teetered on the slick stone of the roof beneath him, hatred, fury and fear boiling up inside him, and he looked up to the sky above him and _twisted_. Light exploded around him, and he was drowning in it, arm flung out above his head, electricity twining down it so that it jerked and danced like a puppet's. He stared in interest as his skin swelled in its wake, as if a snake were writhing down his arm. The red scar turned white and then purple again, and he was back on the table.

White hot pain sliced through the nerves of his back, and he could only give out a choked cry. Hot moisture dripped down his face, and his own voice cried out, breathy with pain, in his ear, "Please stop. Please."

They were dizzy and in pain, but awake. Sitting up. Half of them crackling with the lightning reflected in the eyes of the other half. For a long, stretched moment, they didn't know where they were, and their hearts beat an asynchronous four-note phrase. Then Ral yanked his mind back into his own head. He was breathing hard, the phantom pain fading slowly from his back. "What the _fuck_ , Jace?" he demanded.

The mind mage covered his face with his hands. He was shaking. "Sorry," he managed. "Sorry, I'm—sorry."

Ral could still feel the jolting sickness running down his back in the wake of the knife, and it made him shudder as well. Fuck. He'd had no idea—Jace had his arms wrapped around himself, taking short gasping breaths as he tried to calm himself down. Ral glanced around the tent. No healer. Of course. He shuffled across the floor of the tent onto Jace's pallet and pulled him into a rough embrace.

Jace stopped breathing for a moment, freezing into perfect immobility. "What?" Ral demanded. "You're shivering, Beleren. You're cold. You can't sleep if you're cold. If you don't sleep, you won't recover, and then we'll be stuck here on this godsforsaken plane even longer. As it is, Niv is going to have my head when I get back. Tanit, I hope I turned off the electricity to the grid, or I'm in even more trouble."

Inhaling another shiver that Ral felt every minute flutter of, Jace nodded tiredly. "Yeah," he said slowly. "Cold."

"I'm surprised you didn't stick your head into my lap again," Ral grunted. "Now go back to sleep. And for fuck's sake, stay out of my head this time."

"I'll do my best," Jace said with a shaky laugh. He started to lie down again, and Ral followed him down to lie pressed against his back. He could already feel the knobs of Jace's back standing out, despite the fact that just a day or two ago he'd been complaining that the mind mage was too heavy. "Ral?" Jace's voice said into the darkness, his voice coming out tired and muzzy.

"Yeah?"

"I'd miss the rain mage."


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary:** In which Ral is frustrated, Ral's new friend makes herself scarce, and Jace is once again conscious enough to make terrible decisions.

 **Chapter Five**

Ral wanted to cry with boredom. He'd been sitting in this damn tent for hours now, slowly falling asleep, as Brimaz negotiated with the cultists. Or—whatever. Ral wasn't certain what he was doing here, but the leonin king seemed to think his presence was indispensible. So far, his indispensability seemed to have taken the form of sitting inside a tent at the front of a table and staring vaguely at the ceiling, trying to decide if there was an optimal number of tent poles to maximize space inside the damn thing.

A small prickle ran through his ungloved hand, and he looked across to see that his star pupil, whose name had turned out to be Iskra, had a tiny spark jumping in her hand. She was sitting demurely cross-legged, and she looked up at him and raised a finger to her lips. Ral glanced around. Brimaz and most of the adult leonin were talking seriously with the cultists. They seemed pretty wrapped up in what they were doing.

Ral grinned and crooked a hand at Iskra, who flicked the spark across the room. He caught it in the palm of his gauntlet, bouncing it around and adding a little mana, so that it grew from thumbnail-sized to just under palm-sized, then glanced around and lobbed it quickly back. There was a soft zapping noise, and Brimaz's ears perked up. The leonin king glanced around in puzzlement, but Iskra was innocently studying her whiskers, the hand still holding the spark-ball hidden at her side.

As soon as his attention was diverted again, Iskra shot the spark-ball back. It arced across the tent toward Ral's unprotected hand, and he smirked and caught it with his bare palm, then let it run up and across his shoulder to his head and down to the other side. Iskra's ears perked up and her demeanor changed as she leaned forward, tail lashing with what Ral assumed was excitement.

She held out her own hand again, and Ral sent the spark-ball spinning from his right hand to his left and back, then shot it over to her. She caught it with a jerk, her fur puffing out around her head in a sudden burst of sparks. Oops. Had he increased the power a little too much? The ears were still up, though, and she didn't seem particularly put off. A child after his own heart.

Iskra shook herself, spraying sparks in every direction, and this time, one of the cultists' heads turned to stare. Ral hastily leaned back and stared at the ceiling again.

Several minutes later, a jolt of lightning hit him in the head. Whipping round, he found Iskra staring innocently past his shoulder. He narrowed his eyes at her, but waited until she finally sat back with a sigh and a huff of impatience, and then flicked a spark at her tail.

She stiffened, the electricity climbing her spine and popping between her ears and hissed, claws unsheathing from inside her hands. Ral smirked at her, and this time she simply bolted him back. He felt the mana levels rising and realized before it left her hand that it was too much, that the ignition would be enough to—

The thunderclap that echoed through the tent caused all eyes to turn to Iskra and Ral. The kitten visibly shrank, her ears flattening against her head, her claws retracting instantly. Ral shifted in his chair, trying to pretend nothing had happened, but it was only too obvious exactly what had.

"Iskra," said one of the older leonin warningly. "Back to your tent. Now. I thought you knew better than this."

Iskra got slowly to her feet, tail dragging between her legs. It was clear from the looks and whispers that jumped from the group of children on her side of the tent that this was a disgrace for someone of her age.

"I think you should let her stay," Ral said lazily, electricity crawling across the front of his shirt.

There was dead silence. Iskra looked up with widening eyes and shook her head minutely, but Ral didn't care. He was feeling black and vicious, little half-remembered sentences from his childhood floating up and clawing at his brain.

"So," one of the cultists said in amusement. "This is not what I expected to find in a leonin encampment. A little lightning-caller. Do you blasphemers teach all your children our secrets?"

Brimaz sighed. "Iskra, please go," he said. "Zarek, the child is being disruptive. Perhaps—"

Iskra's ears and whiskers drooped again and she headed for the tent entrance. Ral got to his feet. "I think I'll go, too," he said pleasantly. "I'm bored."

* * *

For one instant after Jace woke up, he thought he was in the middle of a hurricane. Wind, rain, and lightning buffeted his head before he succeeded in sitting up, limbs trembling with the effort. A wave of nausea passed over him, but he succeeded in stopping himself from vomiting by dint of squeezing his eyes shut and suppressing his gag reflex as hard as he could.

The hurricane subsided slightly, along with the anger that Jace realized had hit him square in the chest, both of them swallowed in a wave of guilt that was quickly suppressed. "Fuck!" Ral Zarek's voice exploded into the sudden silence. "I want to go home. As soon as I actually find anyone who makes this fucking plane bearable, they get taken away."

Groggily, Jace opened his eyes. "What happened, Ral?" he asked.

Both of Ral's fists were clenched at his sides, and though the storm had fallen away, lightning crackled around him in a brilliant halo. "There is exactly one person here other than you I can stand to be around," Ral said through clenched teeth. "And I've just been forbidden to speak to her. Apparently, I'm a bad influence. Not that they were willing to say that to my face. Just—" He growled angrily, looking as if he wanted to hit something, but there was nothing for him to hit. Lightning flashed from his gauntlet to the tent pole instead. " 'She's too young, Zarek. It's dangerous to teach her to manipulate such elements at her age.' Fuck that. The kid's talented, and there's no one here who can teach her, and—" Jace heard the sound of teeth audibly grinding together, and he winced.

"Ral—" he said.

"I AM NOT SUPPOSED TO CARE ABOUT A PLANEBOUND CHILD!" They stared at each other, and Ral covered his eyes and sank into a sitting position beside the bed, the lightning fading away slowly. "Fuck," he said. "Fuck. Forget I said that. Just. I need to get back to Ravnica. I don't like it here."

Jace nodded wearily, wincing at the pain in his chest. "I'm sorry," he said quietly. "The leonin can probably care for me, if you want to…"

"If I want to what?" snapped Ral.

Jace waved a hand. "Leave. I've been in worse situations."

Ral glared at him. "Fuck that," he said. "I'm not leaving you, Beleren. Just get better."

The instant denial sent a sudden stab of guilt mixed with gratitude through Jace's chest. Even if it was just for the Guildpact, Ral's loyalty was touching. And he wasn't entirely convinced that it was, though he decided not to stick his mental hand into Ral's head to check. He'd had enough of being nearly electrocuted in the last few days to risk it again.

"I'm doing my best," Jace said weakly.

"Yeah, I know," Ral muttered, running a hand through his hair. "Sorry I got water everywhere. I'll have to do something about cleaning that up."

"It's fine," Jace said. "I think you evaporated most of the rain anyway."

* * *

Iskra was making herself scarce. This was something that she had often been told to do, sometimes by her parents, and quite often by the rest of the adults of her den. "Make yourself scarce, kitten," her mother would say cheerfully, when she had stuck her tail into the cooking one too many times.

"Make yourself scarce, kitten," her father said, when she tried to slip in and join the warriors at their practice.

"Make yourself scarce," the guards said warningly when she tried to sneak a peek into Brimaz's tent.

Iskra was very good at making herself scarce. She did so not by actually leaving, but by practicing her stealth skills, until she had gotten to the point where most of the time, she was able to avoid people telling her to make herself scarce by never being noticed at all.

After a long, stern talking-to from her mother about the necessity of not disrupting important meetings, and a further long talking-to from her father about not associating too closely with lightning mages, no matter how pleasant they were, Iskra was exceedingly tired of being told what to do, and therefore she had decided to make herself scarce in the general vicinity of the most recent meeting.

The grown-ups—leonin and worshippers of Keranos and Zarek—had moved to an outside location to talk, which made things much easier. All she'd had to do was wait until their backs were turned, and then clamber up into the large-limbed tree that overlooked the area.

Unfortunately, the discussion turned out to be fairly dull at first, but Iskra had spent enough time patiently getting there that she wasn't about to just turn around and leave. So, instead, listening to the discussion with only one ear, she dozed and played with sparks.

Many of Iskra's teachers had dispensed wisdom. _Think of yourself as one with your companions_ , one of her sparring instructors was fond of saying. Or there was her oldest brother, who told her to listen to the earth when he was teaching her to track. Iskra tended to find such statements too abstract to be terribly helpful, so her first lesson in lightning magic had been a rather pleasant surprise.

 _Stick your hand out like this_ , he'd said. Palm flat out, facing up. _Now make a spark._

Iskra had been the only one to ask _how_? as the others simply waited expectantly.

The explanation she had received had been a little too complex for her to follow all of. But it had been _concrete_. Lightning meant separating different kinds of charged mana and then letting them flow back together, like water flowing down a river bottom. You took them apart and they wanted to fall back together, but they fell back too fast and crashed into one another. Something like that. She wanted to ask him more questions. Probably about a hundred. She'd only managed three or four, but then there hadn't been much time.

As the adults bargained, Iskra idly flicked sparks from one hand to the other, trying to conjure a new one while the first one was in the air. She lost control of them several times, sending sparks spitting down the tree, but they dissipated quickly and everyone was too focused to notice.

After a few minutes, her hands were buzzing with a little network of glittering motes, leaping from finger to finger. It took an intense amount of concentration that Iskra hadn't entirely expected, to keep the pattern going, one little light hopping after another and another, round and round and round…

The individual sparks began to blur as the brightness left green and pink trails in her vision, and she watched them, mesmerized, her fingers tingling. As they swirled brighter and brighter, she thought she could see a pattern forming within the whiteness—red and blue swirling together into a strange, stylized circle. She thought she could see a sort of beak pointing to the right—a pair of batlike wings—she squinted in confusion, cupping her hands as if she were holding water in them—and the vision vanished as suddenly as it had appeared, the sparks leaping from her hands and cascading down her arms.

She sat back thoughtfully just as a thunderbolt leaped down from the sky and crashed into the center of the circle below. Iskra's ears perked up and she leaned forward. Someone had said something distressing to Zarek, and that meant she might get a chance to see some proper storm magic firsthand again.

* * *

Jace had actually managed to sleep through the night for once, he noted, waking to what was probably the first rays of dawn seeping into the empty tent. Ral had left already, whether because someone had summoned him or simply because he was hungry, Jace wasn't certain. He was just turning over to give up and try to go back to sleep, when the tent flap opened and the lightning mage swept in, looking faintly harassed.

"How are you feeling, Jace?" he asked, stepping aside to let Xenia enter as well.

"Um," said Jace awkwardly, trying to sit up. "A little better?" He shook his head minutely at Ral's loaded glance, and the lightning mage's shoulders slumped slightly.

"Let me help you get your clothes on," Ral said roughly.

"What?" said Jace.

"The culti—the worshipers of Keranos want you," the lightning mage responded.

" _What_?"

Xenia bowed her head. "They've requested an audience with Keranos' chosen oracle. We were hoping you might be willing to…relay some information back to us."

Jace felt cold revulsion and fear settling into the pit of his stomach. "No," he said. "Absolutely not."

"We wouldn't let them take you," Xenia said awkwardly.

"No," Jace said again.

"Let me talk to him," Ral put in. "Here," he said to Jace, shoving the cloak at him. Xenia allowed herself to be escorted back out, and then Jace found himself alone with Ral.

"What the fuck, Guildpact?" Ral asked. "Do you really think I'd let you do this if it was dangerous? They're not going to let Keranos take you."

"That is not the point," Jace said tightly, clamping down on the burgeoning fear in his chest, a fear he didn't know how to control or articulate. "I'm not going to do this. I can't do this. I won't."

"Jace, come on," said Ral, sounding frustrated. "We need their help. Getting into an argument with them isn't going to do any good."

"You mean like you arguing with them over your new kitten friend?" Jace asked frostily.

"That's not—" Ral swallowed the end of whatever his intended statement had been. "Jace, for fuck's sake."

Jace managed to lever himself dizzily to his feet, wrapping the cloak around him almost automatically. "I can't do this," he said. "Find something else to keep them happy."

Ral put a hand to his head. "I have been debating this for fucking hours," he said levelly. "They wanted more than this. They wanted to send you in as some kind of fucked-up sleeper agent, Jace, and I bargained them out of that. All— _all_ you have to do is go in, sit around there for a while, pick up some of the thoughts from the cultists, and—"

"So you told them about my telepathy?" Jace asked. A chilly rage boiled up along with the fear, and his hand automatically traced along the edge of his robe.

"I—well, yeah, I mean, it came up—I'm not exactly good at diplomacy, Jace!"

The fear and rage overtook even the exhaustion. Jace reached for his manabonds and wrapped the illusion of invisibility around him, stepping out of the image of himself he had left behind and hurrying for the tent entrance. As he slipped through it, he let the illusion behind him dissolve, heard Ral's puzzled voice shaping his name, but he was driven by a single desire—not to let this happen again.

He needed to get away.

The feeling drove him out of the leonin encampment and through the fields on the far side before he even began to feel the exhaustion, but it caught up quickly. Pain radiated outward from his lungs to his arms and legs, and he had to stop moving, bending over at the waist and trying to draw long, shuddering breaths. He was sick, he was so damn sick, he needed to turn around and go back.

A single glance back at the scattered little encampment made his heart skip a beat and drove his feet onward again. He didn't know where he was going, but he needed to get somewhere—anywhere else. No one was going to use him like this again. He needed to be somewhere else.

It was another few minutes before he paused, leaning against a nearby tree, and admitted to himself that the 'somewhere else' he needed to be was Ravnica, with Lavinia calling for a healer. Guiltily, he considered trying to planeswalk. Ral would follow eventually—probably much faster than eventually. The Izzet mage had a healthy respect for his own skin. Jace doubted he would stick around on Theros too long after he was certain that he couldn't find the Guildpact.

Leaning against the tree, feeling the grain of the bark against his arm, he shut his eyes and tried to will the world away. The moments between heartbeats began to stretch, as he breathed in, breathed out. The walls of the world thinned like ice melting beneath his breaths, and he felt the bright shadow of the Eternities hot-cold on his back, pushing him away and pulling him in.

He was falling toward the sky again, and a memory was tossed up—not his, one of the myriad he'd stolen—of playing in the ocean and a wave breaking over his head. The blue sky overhead turning to blue water below, and the stomach-churning lack of air as bubbles floated away in every direction. He was caught, trapped, smeared across nothingness and breaking apart with the bubbles, with only the pattern of tree-bark beneath his palm keeping him from drowning.

Jace pulled back, and his connection to the Eternities snapped instantly, sending a wave of shuddering dizziness through him as if a gong had gone off in his head. He was on the ground, vomiting miserably, shaking as if he had a high fever, one hand still pressed desperately against the tree at his back.

When he finally managed to look up, exhausted and utterly miserable, the trees around him seemed to have grown taller and darker. He had been trudging through ferns and undergrowth, but beneath his hands and knees there was now a scattering of red pine needles. Though he knew he hadn't succeeded in leaving the plane, he seemed to have managed to come close. He hadn't returned to his starting point after his little dunk into the eternities. Putting a hand to his aching head, Jace realized that he was completely and irrevocably lost and alone.


	6. Chapter 6

**A/N:** In which Ral is definitely not panicking, and Iskra helps out.

 **Chapter Six**

Ral stared stupidly at the place where Jace had disappeared. "Jace? This isn't funny. Where are you? I swear to god, I'll electrocute everything in here if I have to."

No answer. The tent was silent, empty of everything but Ral Zarek and his sudden, unreasonable panic. No noise, not even the sound of breathing. He hadn't planeswalked—Ral would have felt the touch of the Eternities if the fabric of the plane had been ruptured, even briefly. "Jace?" he said again. It was an illusion. It had to be.

He groped his way from one end of the tent to the other, desperately trying to find a hint of mind mage. He couldn't have left. He was sick. No one could be stupid enough to just—walk off—who was feeling as sick as Jace had looked. Right?

"Fuck," Ral muttered, his blood starting to pound in his ears. He put a hand to his forehead, and lightning flickered in front of his eyes. "Right. Okay. He's probably—outside somewhere." He headed out of the tent, looking around. Xenia was waiting a few steps away. "Did you see him?" Ral demanded. "Where is he?"

"What?" Xenia asked, sounding confused.

"Jace Beleren. Jace. My—companion. Your oracle. He left."

"He _what_?"

Ral ran trembling hands through his hair. "He didn't want to get involved, and he fucking _left_. You didn't see him?"

She shook her head. "I haven't seen anyone."

"Fuck," Ral said, suddenly lightheaded and reluctant to consider possible causes. "Fuck, we have to find him. He's sick. Goddammit."

"I'll go to Brimaz," Xenia said. "We'll find him."

She hurried off toward the other side of the encampment, leaving Ral standing in the middle of the ground, frantically adjusting his gauntlet with trembling fingers. That goddamn Guildpact. If he got killed, Ral would never forgive himself. Ravnica would fall apart. That should have been his first thought, shouldn't it?

Damn, damn, damn. He felt at his belt, wondering if he had anything useful with him, but he came up empty. If only he'd made something that could detect invisible creatures—how would that even work? Well, for Jace, something that was attracted to mana. The Guildpact shed magic the way most people gave off heat. Interesting idea, actually. Ral had done a little work on heat-sensitive instrumentation—if he could somehow modify it to work on the basis of mana currents instead of infrared radiation, perhaps he could make something to—oh, what was the use. He didn't have access to any of his equipment, and every minute that went by was another minute trickling away during which Jace could be getting farther away. Closer to dying.

By the time Xenia returned with a small party of leonin, including Brimaz, Ral had turned the dial on his gauntlet up to its maximum setting, and he still felt full to bursting, electricity wobbling along the hairs of his arms and back, excess voltage bursting into sparks in the air around him.

"Let's see if we can pick up his trail," Brimaz said tightly, and Ral nodded, equally tightly. Damn this wilderness. In a city, he'd at least have known how to start. But here—surrounded by trees and sky—he felt lost. This was not his world.

He couldn't have gone far, Ral repeated to himself. Why would he? Simply because they'd had some kind of stupid argument? Jace wasn't that stupid. He wouldn't kill himself out of anger. Just because Ral had let slip that he had telepathic abilities. Ral ground his teeth together and followed the leonin. Trailing at the back, he felt completely useless.

If there was anything that he hated more than standing still and quiet while someone else tried to work, Ral couldn't think of it. Not that he could think of much, because his brain had bucked off the last semblance of being under his control, and all he could do was replay the scene with Jace over and over again in his head, trying to figure out what he should have said differently, done differently, to make this not happen. Despite the incredible uselessness of this repeated loop, it was still better than the other images his brain kept vomiting up—Jace, whimpering through the nightmares, convulsing with a fit of coughing so hard he couldn't catch his breath, the horrible greenish-white tint of his face.

They moved slowly but steadily to the edge of the encampment, the leonin band seeing and discussing subtle signs of Jace's passage that to Ral's eyes looked like nothing. A crushed blade of grass? Surely there were millions of blades of grass in the world, and Ral could think of at least a hundred ways they could be crushed off the top of his head. The probability of _that_ particular blade of grass having been trodden down by the Guildpact instead of a predator, or a child in an unusual place, or a sudden gust of heavy wind—no, this wasn't helping. The leonin must know what they were doing.

Midway through the field of long grass beyond, they found the first indication that meant anything to Ral—half a human footprint at the edge of a well-placed mud puddle, and a thread of blue cloth clinging to a twig. Half a bare footprint. Lightning skittered along the edge of Ral's gauntlet. Jace hadn't even bothered to put on shoes. Did he have a death wish? Didn't he care about himself at all? Didn't he care about _Ravnica_ at all?

The sun was hot, and Ral was sweating and itchy in his many layers of clothing by the time they reached the forest on the far side of the field. How had Jace even managed to make it this far? Either he'd been less sick than he'd let on, or he was more stubborn than Ral gave him credit for. Ral wasn't sure which one was worse.

Several minutes into the welcome shade of the trees, the group of leonin broke apart from a purposeful knot into a number of confused, directionless individuals. For at least five agonizing minutes, they milled around in all directions, clearly searching for something. Finally, Ral cracked. "What's going on?" he asked.

"The trail is gone," Brimaz answered. "It's as if he flew away. As if he stopped existing. Dark magic at work here. I suspect the gods."

 _As if he stopped existing_. Had he actually planeswalked? Then why had he bothered to slog his way across a muddy field and half a forest?  
"This is crazy," Ral said out loud.

"I'm sorry, Zarek," said Brimaz. "I'm afraid we'd better head back to camp and regroup. Perhaps we can go to a seer and—"

"No," interrupted Ral. "No, fuck it, I'm done, I am _done_ , this is impossible, this is ridiculous, I am going home." He nearly reached for the Eternities then and there, but at the last minute stopped himself, instead unleashing a bolt of lightning at a particularly unlucky pine tree and stalking off into the undergrowth. He heard voices calling after him, but they soon faded. They'd get over it. They'd expect him to come back, and he wouldn't come back, and then they'd forget about him. A sharp, miserably painful thought followed that one: was that what Jace had thought?

Ral kicked a tree. Where had the thought even come from? Jace knew he was valuable.

Did he know he was valued? Those damn nightmares. Ral ground his teeth together. All right, so he liked being around Jace. So the man wasn't completely horrible. Was reasonably intelligent, surprisingly brave, and frustratingly stubborn. And apparently had experienced more than his fair share of trauma.

This was useless. Ral needed to decide what to do, not stand here analyzing his feelings. The Guildpact must have planeswalked. But had he made it safely back to Ravnica? Should Ral go back and assume? Hope? If he went back without Jace, there was no question the Azorius would suspect him of involvement in the Guildpact's disappearance. And he couldn't rid himself of the horrible nausea that clawed at his insides when he wondered if Jace had made it to the Eternities and then simply—broken apart.

The noise of quiet footsteps made Ral turn, lightning springing easily to his fingertips—maybe too easily. He made a mental note to increase the capacitance of the gauntlet at the next available opportunity.

"I think I know where to find your friend," Iskra said excitedly. There were dark, singed marks on the tips of her fingers around the places where the claws extruded, but she didn't seem to be in pain as she leapt lightly over the undergrowth and reached out to take his hand.

"What? How?"

"The sparks told me," she responded cheerfully. "And I went and got one of his shoes, so we can check using a finding-spell if we need to when we're close enough."

"The—what? Wait—are you sure?" She had started dragging him along, and he followed slowly, but with cautious optimism starting to rise in his chest.

"Pretty sure. My parents said I shouldn't play with the lightning yet, and I guess I did burn my hand, but I know what I saw. The symbol of Pharika."

"Who?" asked Ral.

Iskra gave him a confused look. "Pharika? Goddess of poison and medicine?"

"Look, kid," Ral said in irritation. "I can't keep track. If you think you know where Jace is, just take me there already."

He expected her to say something else. To—want to go back and tell her parents, maybe? That was how children thought, wasn't it? But she just nodded and said, "This way."

* * *

The shadows were moving strangely. Jace clutched at his aching chest and leaned against a nearby tree. He just needed to keep moving. His feet hurt as well, but it was a strangely distant pain compared to the pain in his chest, which was like a hot star radiating fire. Shivering, he managed to step forward again—twice—three times.

Something cracked underneath his foot, and Jace felt the world slewing sideways as he fell. He thought it was the dizziness welling up again, and then he landed, pain shivering upward through his back, his own soft gasp ringing in his ears. Colorful dots swirled in front of his eyes for a long moment, but when they cleared, all he could see was green. Dappled shadows moved in his vision, and a low hissing sounded in his ear.

He tried to move, but wasn't sure if his fingers actually responded. Something soft and dry slid across his arm, and Jace blinked his blurry eyes and tried to focus. More soft movement across his arms, his feet, his throat. The soft hissing grew louder. He saw rippled scales and a slitted, golden eye.

"Oh no." His voice was tinny and faint in his ears. Snakes. Their soft, dry bodies slid over his exposed skin, and he felt a forked tongue flicker by his ear. A convulsive, full-body shiver ran through him, and he heard someone whimpering softly, a sound that faded quickly. The hissing crescendoed into a murmuring whisper, as if they were muttering to each other about the strange creature that had fallen into the center of their nest.

Jace lay and tried not to move and wondered if they would leave. Somehow, it didn't seem likely. Somehow, a far likelier scenario involved him dying in a pit of snakes, the Guildpact unraveling like a too-old tapestry, Ravnica crumbling around him. Jace's head ached dully, and the whispering of the snakes sounded like the rushing of water around him. He was thirsty.

Time wore on. Jace felt the sun's heat, which had started on his face, move down his chest. Sweat beaded in patches on his forehead and trickled down, and he grew thirstier. The tight, hot pain in his chest worsened until he could hear the echo of someone moaning softly near his ear.

The snakes were moving again; he could feel their dry bodies sliding over his throat and arms, like hands caressing him. Blinking his eyes, he saw dark purple fire rising, shimmering and slithering upward, and a voice murmuring in his ears.

The purple turned green in a sudden burst, and the voices multiplied. Hands touched Jace, and the world around him rocked sickeningly. He shut his eyes, willing the nausea away, but the world continued to move, slewing from side to side, the only thing staying constant the pain in his chest.

Something cool and wet was laid against his forehead. The voices murmured louder, running together in Jace's muddy ears. Were the snakes talking? A blade brushed across the top of his chest, and he felt the ragged strands of his shirt part beneath it. Strange, soft touch on his chest, but it was too close—too close to the burning hot thing in the center. He whimpered, and then he screamed.

The voices grew louder.

* * *

Slogging through the undergrowth soon had Ral finding new and creative ways to be obscene. He didn't like wilderness. It was too hot and too bright and too muddy. Not to mention the fact that he was entirely incompetent at traversing it.

Iskra padded lightly along, ducking beneath whippy branches or gracefully sidestepping puddles, following some directional sense of her own Ral would at this point have considered giving up a small appendage for—possibly one of his toes, or a pinky. He already had scratches on his face where he had entirely failed to duck beneath some of the lower-hanging branches, and the bottoms of his trousers were shredded.

Then the small biting insects showed up. Ral growled wordlessly as he swatted at his exposed neck and face, but it didn't seem to do much good. "Iskra," he said. "How the fuck do you not—" She turned, one ear flicking down and up, and he realized that any insect would have a hard time getting through the thick coat of coarse fur. "Never mind," he sighed, and let loose a single, crackling burst of electricity across his skin. Small corpses dropped to the ground, but they were soon avenged by dozens more of their living compatriots. Ral growled wordlessly and tried to ignore the itching bumps already swelling up on his neck and face.

The trees grew taller and darker as they walked, the sounds of their footfalls muffled in the dead leaves below them, which slowly changed to red pine needles. As they passed a particularly thick tree—if Ral had put his arms around it, they would not have met on the other side—Iskra halted, her ears pricking up once, then drooping. She turned questioningly toward Ral, her nose twitching.

"We've entered Pharika's territory," she said. "This is as far as I've come before."

"Hrm," said Ral. "Anything I should be careful of?"

"I—I don't know," Iskra confessed. "Snakes, probably."

"So, where to now?"

The kitten took a deep breath. "Let me see if I can find out," she said. She shut her eyes and adopted a slightly wobbly but balanced stance. Ral watched with interest as her whiskers and ears twitched and a tiny wrinkle crawled onto her forehead. After a few minutes, she cracked an eye open, saw that he was looking at her, and shut it again. The fur on the back of her neck went up slightly before relaxing again. Her mouth opened slightly to show off her sharp teeth, and her tail lashed once, and then a tiny spark burst into existence in the palm of her hand.

She opened her eyes, and her ears pricked straight up. A miniature fountain of tiny sparks followed the first one, following her burst of confidence. The sharp tang of ozone filled the air, and the sparks began to swirl like lights reflected on a swiftly-running stream. It was different from the sorts of things Ral normally did with lightning, and he was impressed that she was able to control the sparks to this extent when she had only started using electricity a day or two ago.

Iskra gave a soft little mew, tail lashing again once to each side. Ral's eyes were drawn to hers and, to his surprise, her almond-shaped pupils dilated instead of contracting, growing larger and larger as he watched, reflecting the chaotic jumble of electricity pouring across her hands.

A twig snapped somewhere in the forest; Iskra gave a soft squeak, and the sparks vanished. She staggered backward and leaned against a tree, every line of her body suddenly drooping with weariness. "Hey," Ral said, putting a hand underneath her elbow and wondering if he could carry her if she was too tired to keep going. Well, he probably could, but he would also probably run the risk of bashing her skull into a tree. He still wasn't used to them being everywhere, sprouting up higgledy-piggledy as opposed to the neat rows of a Selesnyan orchard.

"I'm fine!" she protested, flashing him a quick snarl, and Ral held up his hands, palms out.

"Okay," he said. "You looked tired."

"Sorry," she muttered. "Just don't like people touching me." Her ears and tail went down slightly.

"Me either," Ral answered, and the ears went up and backwards. Surprise, probably. Trying to read the body language on a creature without the kind of facial variation he was used to was interesting, to say the least. Jace would probably have better luck.

"Anyway, I think he's this way," Iskra said, a little awkwardly, gesturing with her tail.

Something of the confidence and purpose had returned to her walk as she strode forward, and for a moment, Ral wondered if he'd been like that as a kid—that weird mix of excitement and self-consciousness, easily crushed, easily buoyed. He had a feeling Jace would tell him he still was, but he shook his head in irritation. He didn't like introspection at the best of times, and this was definitely not the best of times.

He was so absorbed in not thinking that he barely felt the ground giving out under his feet, and if Iskra hadn't caught the back of his belt, he would have gone straight down. As it was, he teetered at the edge of the pit for a frightening moment before he managed to flail his arms enough to tip his momentum back toward solid ground. "Thanks," he said gruffly to Iskra.

Together, they peered down into the pit he'd nearly fallen into. It was about thirty feet deep, and the sides were covered with crawling vines. It was hard to make out the shadowy bottom, but Ral could see something moving around in the dimness.

"Somebody else really did fall in," Iskra said, kneeling at the edge and pointing. "Look." Along the opposite side of the pit, the vines were ripped all the way down, and a trail of pine needles and twigs were caught in them. Suspicion and concern gnawed at Ral's stomach, and he hurried around to the other side and knelt over, squinting down the trail of disrupted foliage. Sure enough, a scrap of blue cloth was caught in one of the twigs about halfway down.

"Shit," said Ral. "Jace?" he called, but there was no answer. "Jace! Dammit!"

Fuck it. Caution was overrated anyway. Ral sat down and scooted forward, ignoring Iskra's concerned "what are you doing?" and pushed himself over the side. Clutching at the sides slowed his fall somewhat, but he still landed painfully hard on the bottom. Not content to wait for his eyes to adjust to the semi-darkness, he called a crackling ball of electricity to one hand and stared around.

The bottom of the pit was covered in twigs and dead leaves. Near the side he'd come down, there was an indentation in the detritus, approximately the shape of a body, but still no Guildpact. There was also a large quantity of angry reptiles.

"Ah, fuck," Ral said tiredly as several of the snakes reared up, hissing angrily, displaying fangs. One of them struck at him, and he barely dodged out of the way in time. "Fuck it," he said again, and this time he released a crackling radius of electricity large enough to cover the entire bottom of the pit, just too late to stop as Iskra's yell echoed down from the top, "Zarek, wait!"

All across the pit, snakes writhed and twitched, and the smell of ozone mingled with the smell of cooking meat. For a moment, there was dead silence. Then Ral became aware that the ground was trembling slightly. "Fuck," he said helplessly, looking upward. Iskra was clinging to the side of the pit, her eyes wide, her ears and fur sticking up and out. Ral started to make his way back toward her, when there was a loud, creaking noise followed by a slam, and the earth beneath him rocked dangerously.

Landing on his hands and knees, he instinctively rolled to the side, which turned out to be a good choice, because a huge, serpentine head shot through the air, arm-length fangs burying themselves in the spot of ground he had been occupying until a moment ago. Ral tried to find an obscenity strong enough for the situation and failed miserably.

He scrambled upright, backing away against the wall, as the snake's head withdrew from its distended position and back into the doorway it had struck from. Aching and dizzy, Ral still managed to send a warning bolt across the pit. The lightning hit and splashed across the snake without much visible effect. Ral fumbled with his gauntlet and briefly considered switching it off entirely, but Iskra was too close for comfort. He needed to do something, though—he was going to be snake food any minute. The creature—whose head was easily as large as Ral's entire body—was swaying back and forth, forked tongue tasting the air. The vast, coiled muscles in its neck quivered as it prepared to strike. Well, here was hoping the same trick worked on a monster as had worked on a god. Ral reached for his belt, found the last mizzium charge, and flipped the switch before tossing it across the pit.

The little red light blinked as it flew, and Ral felt a sudden hush descend across the pit. The snake reacted suddenly, shooting forward and snapping the little silver sphere out of midair. Ral stared in something like disbelief, almost too long, shutting his eyes a mere millisecond before the mizzium charge detonated.

In the enclosed space, the impact of the explosion was far larger than it had been in the empty field. He was knocked off his feet, the flash searing red across the inside of his eyelids, and somewhere above him, he heard Iskra give out a noise halfway between a squeak and a roar and some small, distracted part of his mind was impressed that such a tiny cat was able to make such a loud noise.

He hit the back of the pit, and something snapped. Pain lanced up his shoulder and arm, and he thought he cried out, but he wasn't sure. His instinctual need for his own lab took over, and he was three-quarters of the way to the Blind Eternities when the thought of Jace pulled him back to the plane with a bump. Why couldn't he just leave the damn mind mage?

Groggily, he opened his stinging eyes, air sobbing roughly in and out of his throat, teeth clenched against the pain. The enormous snake lay half-out of the doorway on its side, the eye still open, the slit fully constricted. There were dark burn-marks around its closed mouth. As Ral's eyes began to adjust back to something more reasonable for a normal dimness rather than the magnesium-flash-brightness of the mizzium charge, he caught sight of movement in the passage beyond.

Squinting, he caught sight of the writhing movement of dozens of snakes, and he just had time to wonder how they had gotten to head height, when two bright yellow eyes opened in the dimness.

Everything went cold.


	7. Chapter 7

**A/N:** In which Iskra is competent, and someone finally gets Ral to shut up for once.

 **Chapter Seven**

Clinging to the edge of the pit, Iskra stared in horror as a wave of pearly grey swept from Zarek's feet to his head, and in less than a second, the lightning mage's form stiffened into immobility, one hand frozen about his limp shoulder. Iskra heard a soft little squeak of terror issue from her own mouth, and she shut her eyes instantly. There was a gorgon in the passage.

Iskra flattened herself against the rim of the pit, her breathing suddenly too loud in her ears. She'd heard so many horror stories about gorgons, huddled around the campfire with the rest of the cubs as one of the older children told stories of being stalked through the forest by something you couldn't see because if you opened your eyes—and someone always opened their eyes—you'd be turned to stone.

She had to fight the urge to press her ears to her head, because she needed to be able to hear. She needed to know what was happening. Zarek had been in pain—she'd heard it in his breathing. He was so worried about his lover, Iskra thought. He _had_ been so worried. Now he was—

Someone—it had to be the gorgon—was moving lightly across the bottom of the pit, feet rustling amongst the dead leaves. "So," said a quiet voice. "And who are you? The solution to our mystery perhaps?"

Iskra stuffed her hands across her mouth, terrified that a noisy breath would leak out and the gorgon would know she was there. Her tail was quivering, and she forced her head against her arms so hard that she could see strange, colored patterns swirling in front of her eyes. The rustling below seemed to fade, going tinny in her ears, as the bursts of color intensified, and for an instant, the world inverted and peeled back, as if she were stripping the bark from a tree.

Beyond it, all she could see were colors. And through the colors, the sharp peak of a temple rising above a forest made of metal. The curl of an immense tail caught her eye, and the sunlight glinted off sharp, red scales. One golden eye caught Iskra's, and she felt the pressure of an immense mind on hers. For a moment, she retreated in front of it, and then something inside her rebelled. Her people did not bow to gods; why should she bow before an overgrown lizard? She shook his mind away, and the world solidified around her again, and she was on the edge of the pit, breathing in the smell of ozone and dark earth. Nothing had changed except that inside Iskra there was—a tiny spark.

If she wouldn't bow to a dragon, she wouldn't bow to a gorgon either. No one else knew where Zarek was, which meant it was up to her to save the day. Her teeth were still chattering, but she forced her eyes open and looked very carefully over the edge.

There three gorgons now. Two of them stood beside Zarek's stony form, while the third bent over the enormous snake that had attacked him. Iskra could hear that she was murmuring something, but could not make out the words; no matter how much she strained her ears forward, the liquid syllables would not form into something coherent.

She felt something before she saw it, an intensification of the power in the pit, the feeling of something growing before her. It wasn't until she realized that she could make out the individual scales and the dark, singed spots around the serpent's nostrils and mouth that she saw that there was an almost imperceptible green glow lying like a mist across the bottom and sides of the pit. The tang of ozone in the air lessened as the rich smell of old earth and deep forest took its place. Iskra dug her claws into the side and concentrated on not letting her tail lash as the forked tongue of the snake flickered out into the air, and the limp coils shuddered and began to move once more.

It shook its head once, and then slithered across the pit and opened its vast mouth in front of the statue of Zarek. Iskra tensed, searching in panic for the spark inside her, and it answered, but before she could aim at the snake, it opened its mouth and picked the statue up in its jaws. Air surged into Iskra's lungs, expanding and contracting them, and she realized she had stopped breathing for an instant, lungs frozen. She let the tiny spark in her hand dissipate again. It wouldn't have been much use against the snake anyway, considering that it had been able to stand up to Zarek's most powerful attack.

Much as Iskra wanted to scream and shout and throw lightning everywhere, it didn't seem like the appropriate response at this point. Instead, she waited, trembling (and she wasn't sure if it was fear or anger anymore) as the three gorgons and the snake headed back through the doorway they had come out of. It closed behind them, but Iskra could still see its faint outline in the slowly fading glow of the magic they had left behind.

As soon as they disappeared, she slithered over the edge of the pit and down the side. Picking her way carefully across the bottom, she paused in front of the side, studying it until she found the thin cracks that showed her where the door was. A low hissing sound started as she dug her claws into the crack, but she was able to lever the door open and squeeze inside before attracting any worse attention.

Pulling the door shut behind her, she waited for a moment for her eyes to adjust, and then saw a dimly-lit earthen corridor stretching out before her. Glowing green fungus adorned the walls, and she could see the flicker of a torch from around a bend ahead of her.

She set off lightly, following the torchlight and the whisper of sibilant voices ahead of her, pausing carefully before each twist and turn in the corridor to peer around it and ensure that none of the gorgons were looking her way, but they never did. Eventually, the corridor ended in a round, stone chamber with a high roof. From the entrance, Iskra could hear the sound of labored breathing. Peering inside, she saw that the gorgons were clustered around a limp figure lying on a slab in the center, and the trailing blue material spilling down the slab's side told her who it had to be.

What were they going to do to Zarek's companion? Iskra felt a wave of trembling surge up her limbs, but she shut her eyes, stepped forward, and called the lightning.

"D-don't touch him!" she said, her voice coming out high and squeaky. "I'll fry you all!" That sounded like something Zarek would say, and maybe they would believe she could do it. Her fur had gone up and there were sparks shooting off it and crackling away into the air around her.

"And who are you, little cub?" asked an amused female voice.

"I am Iskra of Oreskos, and these men are under the protection of Brimaz! You cannot harm them!"

"Child, we have no intention of harming them. This one burns with a poison I doubt the leonin could cure, and we seek to alleviate it."

"You turned Zarek to stone!"

"He killed a number of our servants and harmed our greatest ally."

"He was j-just trying to protect his friend."

"As are we." Iskra heard footsteps moving across the room, and she backed into the wall.

"Don't touch me!"

"As you wish," murmured the voice. "However, to allay your fears, we must question the stone intruder because he may have knowledge of the poison used against this man. And I do not believe he would have been easy to calm and question had we left him the use of his magic—or his lungs."

Iskra felt her hackles subsiding slightly at the conciliatory tone, but she did not retract her claws. "How are you going to question him if you've turned him to stone?" she asked harshly.

"By turning him to flesh, of course. You ask silly questions, kitten."

"You can _do_ that?" Iskra's eyes sprang open despite herself, her whiskers quivering with interest. The three gorgons in the room were all looking in her direction, and she felt her heart leap into her throat for one horrible instant, before she realized that they all wore large, golden helmets whose visors were pulled down over their eyes.

"We are the chosen of Pharika. What we can hurt, we can heal."

"But everyone says a gorgon's curse is irreversible! How do you reverse it?" She crept closer.

"Perhaps if you watch closely, you'll know," said one of the gorgons. "I doubt it, though. Pharika's touch is not on you, and you do not seem to have much affinity for healing, even for a leonin."

Stung, Iskra's tail lashed, but she was silent as the three gorgons surrounded Zarek. A faint, soft hissing rose into the air, and the ground parted around Zarek's feet as a number of vines rose up, glimmering with green light, to twine around his frozen form. Stripes of pink began to run along the grey stone, like the veins of a piece of marble, but they thickened as they ran. Iskra's sharp ears caught the sound of a faltering heartbeat that came out of nowhere, and Zarek suddenly sucked in a long-arrested breath.

The air turned dry as the tang of ozone rose, but the gorgons stepped aside to reveal to Zarek the limp figure of his companion on the slab, and the crackling eased slightly. "What the fuck?" grunted the lightning mage, straining against the entangling vines. He had to stop, with a hissing noise of pain, clutching at his left arm.

"If you would be so kind as to refrain from calling about Keranos' power," said the first of the gorgons, "we have brought you here because the one that Iskra refers to as your companion has been poisoned, and the power you wield is of the same design as that which poisons him. If he is a man you care about, you will tell us how to safely heal him."

"What?" asked Zarek, sounding confused. "Poisoned? Jace is _poisoned_?"

"There is a stone within his chest that burns with unearthly fire. We fear to touch it, lest we are burned or poisoned ourselves, but it must be removed, or he will die."

"What the fuck are you talking about?" Zarek snarled. "He has a _rock_ lodged in his _chest_? Let me see." Spitting gravel from his mouth, he lurched across the room. The vines hindered his movement, but no longer anchored him to the spot, as he bent over the still form on the stone slab. Iskra hurried to his side, barely tall enough to see.

Zarek's companion was breathing shallowly, his eyes shut, face covered in a sheen of sweat. His shirt was open to show a thin chest that rose and fell with effort, in the center of which was a knot of swollen, inflamed tissue leaking a clear fluid. "You're saying there's something in there?" Zarek asked, stabbing a finger toward it.

"Yes," replied the gorgons. "A stone about as large as a thumbnail, that we dare not touch."

"And you're saying the power I wield—you mean the lightning?"

"No. The fire."

"The mizzium charge?" Zarek's face creased in a puzzled frown. "That does have an unstable—" he paused. "—are you saying someone put a _thermogenic manastone_ in his chest?" There was a long, confused silence. Zarek growled wordlessly, and pulled an item off his belt, shaking it to dislodge a few stray pebbles. Touching it on the side, he raised into the air and held it over the unconscious man on the table. It began to click, slowly at first, but growing in rapidity. "Holy fuck," growled Zarek. "Why didn't he say anything? Mother of rains, how is he even still _alive_?"

Iskra's ear twitched slightly. 'Mother of rains?' That was no curse she'd ever heard.

"Get it out of him and put it into a box made of lead. And then don't open the box." Zarek leaned back. "Get it out of him _now_."

"Lead will restrict its burning properties?"

"Yes," Zarek said tersely. "I'm serious. Get it out, or I'll—"

"Be stone with you," murmured the gorgon, raising her visor. Iskra squawked in alarmed protest as the grey coloration spread once again across Zarek's skin, freezing him with his arm outstretched and a concerned expression on his face.

"Let him go!" she demanded angrily.

"Once his friend is healed, we will restore him as well," said the gorgon. "But he would only impede our work."

"You'd better," muttered Iskra, her tail lashing angrily.

"Do you wish to be stone as well, kitten? Do not interrupt us in our work."

The twinge of fear Iskra felt was mostly overridden by the anger, but she fell silent.

The gorgons moved Zarek's stony form backwards a few feet and clustered around Zarek's companion. Each one carefully removed her visor, and, linking hands, they began to chant, a low, sibilant utterance. Iskra felt the earth beneath her feet rumble gently, and the man on the table moaned, sharp and low. The soft chanting blurred into a murmurming hiss, as snakes rose from the ground around them.

Iskra squeaked softly in alarm, drawing her tail up and backing against the frozen Zarek, but the snakes paid no attention to her. The reptilian tide flowed swiftly but surely up to the daïs in the center of the room, slithering up the stone as if it were horizontal and rippling across the figure on the slab. For a moment, there was silence, except for the ubiquitous, soft hissing. Then the man on the slab screamed, a raw, high-pitched animal noise, and Iskra flattened her ears to her head in dismay.

The mound of snakes thrashed—or the person beneath them thrashed, it was impossible to tell. "What's happening to him?" Iskra managed to say through a fearful, choked-up throat, but the gorgons did not respond. Instead, all three raised their arms, and the mound jerked up again. Something small and bright flew upward, and all three gorgons snapped their faces up toward it. Growing dull and grey, the little rock floated slowly down into the outstretched hand of the first gorgon. The snakes began to slither away down the daïs, like a receding tide.

Curiosity overcoming her terror, Iskra poked her nose out from behind Zarek. "What did you do?" she asked in an awed tone of voice.

"There was blood covering the stone," said one of the gorgons, voice almost amused. "We turned it to lead." Another bent over the figure of Zarek's companion.

"His breathing is easier," she reported. "The fire is gone. The healing will take some hours yet, but he will heal."


	8. Chapter 8

A/N: In which Jace opens up, and Ral attempts to call in the favor Jace owes him.

 **Chapter Eight**

Ral's joints were aching, and the world had shifted yet again. He blinked hard against the sudden influx of sunlight, putting up a hand to shield his watering eyes. What had those damn gorgons done?

"Zarek, are you all right?" Iskra's voice piped up from his side.

"Jace—where's Jace?" He tried to open his eyes, but the sunlight spearing down forced him to squint, and all he could make out was the vague silhouette of an overgrown, square-shaped building.

Iskra tugged on his sleeve and pointed, and this time, straining against the sunlight, he managed to make out what seemed to be a temple, twin fluted columns holding up a roof that was covered in dark green vines. And a blurred figure in blue resting against the pillar on the left.

Ral blinked the moisture from his eyes, and the scene finally came into focus. He drew a sharp breath. Leaning rather wearily against the temple entrance, but missing the ugly bluish pallor that had been spreading across his face, was Jace Beleren.

Ral's stomach flipped, heat rising in his veins, his heart pounding suddenly loud in his ears. "What the _fuck_ were you thinking?" he demanded, jerking his sleeve away from Iskra and starting forward. "You could have died. You _should be_ dead!"

"Sorry to have disappointed you," Jace said in a somewhat flat voice. "We can leave now. That's what you wanted, right?"

"That isn't—that's not—" Of course it was! All Ral had wanted to do since setting foot on this cursed plane was to leave! Krokt only knew what Niv-Mizzet was thinking by now—Ral _and_ the Guildpact, both of them missing for nearly a week. He was toast. He was dragon-food. Ravnica might be dragon-food by now, for all he knew. And yet— "Why, Jace?" He grabbed Jace's shoulder. "So you disagreed with me! Did you know you'd be able to wander off and find a magical cure? Just didn't feel like sharing?"

Jace's eyes slid to the side. "No," he said quietly.

"So you were trying to kill yourself. Because _that_ would have been useful for Ravnica."

"No!" Jace's hand slammed down onto Ral's wrist. "You don't get it, Ral! This has been my whole goddamn life."

"What?" Ral asked in confusion, taken aback by Jace's violent outburst.

"Do you think I just have nightmares about knives and death? I wish I did."

Ral stared at him. "All my life people have tried to use me—all my life that I remember, anyway. The man who did—this—" he gestured awkwardly at his own back, "—he was using me as a tool to control his organization. The first person I ever loved—" Jace swallowed, eyes sliding shut for a long moment before he continued, "—turns out she was just using me too, to steal the same organization from _him_. Ironic, I guess. And then I think I've finally got away from all of that _shit_ —and then—" He broke off suddenly, his mouth shuddering and turning down at the corner.

Ral suddenly felt very small. "And now everyone wants to control the Guildpact." Jace didn't actually respond, but his mouth twitched again. Ral rubbed a hand across his face. "Fuck. Look. I'm sor—I may have—tried to push you too hard. But still—that was incredibly fucking stupid, Jace." His hand beneath Jace's was trembling, and Ral didn't know why.

"You do stupid things all the time," Jace said irritably, and Ral responded with a quiet growl.

"Not like this," he said.

"Oh?" Jace asked, an interested eyebrow creeping upwards.

"You had a thermogenic manastone in your chest, and it didn't occur to you to say anything to the _one person_ on this _entire plane_ who knew what that could do to you!"

Jace paused. "A what?" he asked carefully.

"Why," Ral said, with elaborate care, "did you decide not to tell me you had been poisoned, Jace? And goddammit, what just _happened_? Wasn't my shoulder dislocated? Weren't we in a completely different place?"

"The gorgons healed you and him," put in Iskra, reminding Ral suddenly and forcibly that he and Jace were not alone. "They turned his blood to lead around the stone."

"I—" Jace tried to respond, standing up unsteadily. "I just—" he paused. "I didn't want to worry you," he said quietly. "You were so concerned with being able to leave, and I just—"

"Fucking seriously, Jace? That is the kind of information you need to _tell_ people. So they can _help you_."

Jace looked away, and Ral saw his throat move convulsively as he swallowed. "Yeah," he said. "Um, yeah, I know, actually. I—I panicked. What is a thermogenic manastone?"

"They burn you with a fever," Iskra put in. "And they aren't from this world, are they?"

"Uh," Ral said intelligently, sharing a sudden, panicked look with Jace. "What makes you say that?"

"Because I've seen other worlds," Iskra said in a hushed voice. "I saw them in the sparks you showed me."

Ral was fairly certain Jace was glaring at this point. "I didn't show you any other worlds," he protested.

"I know, but I saw them anyway," Iskra said seriously. "I won't tell anyone, I promise."

Interesting. Ral only knew of one other person who had seen other worlds in their childhood. He felt his eyes drifting toward Jace, wondering if it was something that was consistent between planeswalkers, or if there was something about storm magic in particular. Did this mean that Iskra—well, he could keep an eye on her. Ral realized he was seriously considering returning to this damn gods-ridden world, and mentally sighed. "Yeah, well, make sure you don't," he contented himself by saying.

Iskra nodded.

 _Not a very wise decision,_ Jace's voice said in Ral's head.

 _I didn't show her anything!_ Ral protested. _And I'm not the only one who was talking about other planes in front of her._

"Should I leave now?" Iskra asked awkwardly. "You're not coming back, are you?"

"Not right now," Ral said. "Uh. I mean, you need someone to make sure you're not totally screwing up your lightning work and stuff. So I'll probably be back around at some point." He didn't look at Jace, wasn't sure he could handle what the Guildpact's face looked like right now. Iskra nodded, then her ears went up, and she raised her hand and flicked a spark toward him. Startled, he almost didn't react fast enough, but he managed to catch it in his gauntlet just an inch away from his face and sent it crackling through the air back toward her. "You gonna be okay?" he asked. "I doubt you were supposed to lead me out here."

Iskra shrugged, catching the spark and letting it play across her arm and up her back. "My family might be angry, but they're my family," she said simply. "They'll get over it. You're not going to stay angry with Jace, are you?"

"What?" sputtered Ral, and this time, he risked a glance over. The Guildpact was leaning against the pillar again, his face twitching with suppressed laughter. "I, uh. Jace and I aren't—"

Iskra twitched her nose at him. "You're family," she said. "You both—" she paused. "You both speak the same language. Anyone can see that." Her tail lashed once, a little uncomfortably, and Ral realized that lightning was sparking erratically down his spine again.

"Okay, kid, you better get going," he said, after a minute.

She nodded and scampered toward the trail behind them, but halted at the clearing. "Zarek," she said seriously. "I'm glad I met you. And next time you visit, I'll make lots of bacon!"

Something unexpected welled up inside Ral, and he had to cough and rub a hand across his face. "Thanks," he said gruffly, watching her small form vanish into the trees beyond, before turning back to Jace, who was smirking slightly. "What?" Ral demanded irritably.

There was a pause. _"_ So," said Jace. " 'Thermogenic manastone'?"

"The Izzet use them as power sources," Ral responded. "I don't want to get into the theory right now, but they're unstable. Close exposure to them is akin to poisoning. Has a lot of nasty side-effects. All of which you were displaying until those gorgons did whatever the fuck it was they did. Which incidentally confirms the attempted assassin is a member of the League."

Another pause. Ral stared meaningly at Jace until the other man finally looked away.

"Okay, yeah, not telling you was stupid," the mind mage admitted. "I do stupid things sometimes. I'm sorry that I worried you."

"I wasn't wor—" Jace gave him the most disbelieving look Ral had seen in a while. "I was concerned. About Ravnica."

"Right," Jace said. "That does seem perfectly logical. And you're always logical, aren't you, Ral?"

"Yes. Definitely. I am a man of science and logic, Jace, and I'm glad you understand that."

"Well then," Jace said with a sigh. "I guess this is just one more thing I owe you."

"That's right," Ral agreed, breathing a sigh of relief that they were moving away from the topic of his worr—concern.

"What would you like?" Jace asked.

"What?"

"As you've pointed out repeatedly, I owe you several times over," Jace said, and there was a subtle twist to his voice that Ral couldn't quite identify. "So how would you like me to pay you back?"

Ral's brain went blank. He had spent too long over the past few days bullying Jace into promising him that he owed him to have any idea how to cash in on it. Finally, he managed a grin. "Buy me dinner, and we'll call it even."

There, that ought to buy him some time to think.

"Sounds good," said Jace.

"What?" Ral asked, stupefied.

"Sounds good," Jace repeated with a smile. "I'll slot something into the schedule and swing by Nivix to confirm."

"You— _what_?" said Ral.

"You may want to think about how formally you want me dressed," Jace said with another grin, and before Ral could say anything else, he blinked out of existence and was gone. Ral stared at the place his hand had been resting for a long moment before he, too, slipped into the Eternities, homebound at last.


	9. Chapter 9

**A/N:** In which there is missing equipment, a verity circle, and confirmation of a dinner appointment. Which is definitely not a date.

 **Chapter Nine**

The trip back to Ravnica was rough but short, and they landed with a bump on the rough cobblestones of the lower Tenth. Ral breathed a long sigh of relief as the familiar sights and smells crowded into his consciousness. The stink of rotting garbage wafting upward from one of the grates that connected to the Undercity was oddly comforting, and the buzz of noise even in the semi-deserted alleyway was music to his ears. He turned slowly to his companion. "Krokt, it's good to be home," he sighed, and Jace nodded with a smile. "Where are you off to now? I'd better see you back to make sure no one else tries to take a pot-shot at you."

"I'd better get back to my office," Jace said tiredly. "I just hope my absence hasn't resulted in an interguild incident."

"I hope _mine_ hasn't resulted in an irate dragon," muttered Ral, but he took a moment to gauge the quickest route to New Prahv, which was sufficiently close to the Guildpact's office to be a useful point of reference. "Okay then, let's go. Are you good to walk?"

Jace nodded hesitantly. "I'm still very tired," he said. "But I've been resting—it was mostly the, well, the poison that was stopping me from planeswalking, I think."

Ral paused for a moment before he held out an arm. "Lean on me, if you want," he said, concealing a sudden flash of nervousness to the best of his ability.

"Thanks," said Jace, and took the proffered arm with a tired sigh.

* * *

Jace tried to enjoy being back on Ravnica, but, to tell the truth, he was more tired than he had let on to Ral. Which, he thought guiltily, might mean he was falling right back into the habit of not telling people things they needed to know. On the other hand, they would be back soon, and this was hardly the same level as the poisoning.

Still… "Ral," he said.

"Hm?" The Izzet mage turned toward him, and Jace was caught off-guard by the half smile on his face. He suddenly realized that he'd agreed to take Ral out to dinner, which might, under other circumstances, be construed as a d—

A sudden bolt of blue-white light made him jump backwards, and a corona of force blossomed around his companion. "Living Guildpact!" someone called. Jace turned in a daze to see Lavinia, flanked by three other Azorius arresters, hurrying into the alleyway. "Jace," she said, grasping his shoulder. "Are you all right?"

"I'm—" Jace almost said fine, then remembered the still slightly raw wounds on his chest and compromised with, "—I'll be fine."

Without another word, Lavinia turned from him to Ral's form, frozen inside the shimmering detention sphere. "Ral Zarek, Izzet guildmage," she said. "You are under arrest on suspicion of kidnapping and assault on a government body."

* * *

"Did Guildmage Zarek injure you in any way?"

"No, he didn't," Jace said in exasperation for what felt like the hundredth time. He was standing inside a verity circle, in the center of a group of Azorius arresters. "I have told you again and again that Guildmage Zarek rescued me from an assassination attempt. I apologize for disappearing, but I had no choice."

"Where did you go?"

Jace shut his mouth and shook his head. "It's not safe for me to answer that," he said. "Somewhere I would be safe."

The Azorius arrester frowned, but nodded. "Of course, Guildpact. You are under no obligation to answer any of these questions."

"Well, I'll answer as many as possible, until you let Ral go," Jace said in frustration. "He was not responsible for the attack."

"To your knowledge, that's certainly clear," said the arrester, but she smiled at Jace. "You've made it very evident what you believe, Living Guildpact, and you certainly don't appear to be under an enchantment or other spell. Thank you for putting up with all of these questions."

Jace shook his head in irritation. "I understand you're doing your best, Arrester Flavia," he said. "Where is Lavinia?"

"She's interrogating Zarek," replied Flavia. "He's in a verity circle. If his story matches your own, I believe he'll be free to go."

Jace nodded, stepping carefully out of the verity circle. "I think I'd like to go lie down, if you don't mind," he said.

"Of course, Guildpact," responded Flavia.

* * *

Ral Zarek was in a foul mood. He had spent the last six hours in a verity circle, not to mention being stone for an indeterminate amount of time before that. And now he had returned to his lab to find that half his equipment had been confiscated by the Azorius as part of their 'investigation.' He was just sitting down at his eviscerated lab table to try and salvage something, when there was a knock on the door.

Snarling something like ' _gragh_ ,' Ral flung himself back to his feet and stomped over to the door, yanking it open. The man standing on the other side was sufficiently high in the Izzet hierarchy for Ral to spend half a second wondering whether it was worth it to insult him. He compromised with, "What do you want, Andon?" deliberately dropping the other's title.

Bori Andon raised an eyebrow. "I merely came by to help you out, Zarek."

"Really."

"Yes. May I come in?" Ral stepped back just enough that the other mage had to pass uncomfortably close to him to enter the room. Andon gave him a tight smile and slid in, sucking in his rather expansive gut to get past. "I heard you had lost some equipment to the Azorius. Quite an extensive loss, I see?"

Ral growled. "Did you come here to gloat?"

"On the contrary," smiled the other man. "I came to offer you the use of some of my own equipment."

The lightning mage frowned, somewhat set back. While there was no particular rivalry between him and Andon, there was no particular friendship either. "That would be astonishingly kind of you," he said finally.

"It would, wouldn't it?" Andon said cheerfully. "Well, that's settled then. I'll send my weird up to drop it off shortly." He clapped Ral on the back jovially, apparently ignoring the displeased flinch the lightning mage responded with, and headed for the door. As he pulled the door shut behind him, Ral heard the tinkling of a tiny bell.

He stood staring at the closed door for a little while before turning back to his desk. He worked in frustration at what little he had left for several minutes, until he heard a soft knock on the door. "Come in!" he shouted, then, as it started to open, "Did Andon happen to send any manalines, because I'm going to need a lot of them."

"Uh," said the voice of the Living Guildpact.

Ral swiveled slowly around in his seat. "What do you want?" he demanded. "I don't want to see anyone. Why don't you just put me out of my misery? Go tell Niv-Mizzet I'm a planeswalker. When I get taken to pieces for his pleasure at least I might see some high-quality equipment again."

"I came to apologize," Jace said. "And to thank you for saving my life. I think I'll be able to convince Lavinia to release your equipment as well. There may just be—a slight delay."

"How long a delay?"

Jace winced. "Up to two weeks," he said heavily. "I'm sorry. It was the best I could do. Lavinia is up to her ears in paperwork. It turns out when the living incarnation of all law and order goes missing after an attempt on his life, a lot of paperwork is generated."

Ral growled something incomprehensible even to himself. "At least I'll see it again at some point in the distant future," he conceded. "Well, thanks for coming by to tell me in person. I take it they're not going to arrest me again for having you set foot in my office?"

"I certainly hope not," Jace said darkly. "I may be the Living Guildpact, but I had better be allowed to have a personal life."

"A personal life?" drawled Ral. "Coming by to apologize is truly personal, Beleren."

"Well." Jace coughed, stalled, and then spoke again. "I actually also came around to arrange the repayment of my debt and set up that dinner appointment."

"Ah, right, that." Ral waved a hand. "Consider the debt repaid. I've got a lot to do to get my lab back in shape, and I'm incredibly behind on my work."

He turned away, waiting for Jace to leave, but the Guildpact stood silently for a moment before speaking again. "I couldn't possibly do that," he said, calmly. "What kind of incarnation of law would I be if I didn't repay my debts?"

"Look, Beleren—"

"Besides, I'd like to take you out to dinner."

Ral's head shot up again. That—was unexpected. "Would you," he said flatly.

"I am grateful to you, Ral, but I also—" Jace paused and swallowed. "Your cat friend was right. We speak the same language. We—well, we understand one another."

"If you say so," grunted Ral.

"I'm not asking you on a date," Jace said, possibly a little too quickly. "Just dinner. Just to—get to know one another. Spend time together when we're not fighting for one or other of our lives."

"If I say yes, will you leave?"

"For now."

"Ugh. Fine. Whatever you want. If you come back before seven, I'll probably electrocute you."

"Then I'll see you at seven." Jace gave him a smile before turning around and heading out of the room. For some reason, Ral found his gaze drawn down along the Guildpact's back, but all he could see was the straight line of Jace's cloak. Well, what else had he been looking for?


	10. Chapter 10

**A/N:** In which Ral and Jace absolutely do not go on a date.

 **Chapter Ten**

The small, neat side street was tucked away in a quiet corner of the Tenth District, relatively near Vitu-Ghazi. The hedges were trimmed and well-kept, and small flower-boxes were perched on the low walls surrounding the houses.

Ral Zarek looked out of place in the Selesnyan area, wearing a long red-and-blue coat with edges that nearly brushed the ground, the gauntlet on his right arm sparking erratically. He appeared to have dragged a comb through his hair, but possibly gotten bored halfway through—either that or he'd had a run-in with an electrical outlet after having done so.

Jace, himself, not without a pang, had traded his usual outfit for a much simpler one, just a well-made soft brown shirt and trousers. Unfortunately, he'd purchased them at a point when he hadn't lost so much weight, and they hung loose on his now-skinny frame. He had left his cloak neatly folded up and locked in his desk, hoping that he would be less visible that way. Though Lavinia had not quite forbidden him from going out, he suspected she would be less than pleased to find he had a—dinner appointment—with the man he had vanished with for nearly a week.

It still felt strange to be taking someone out to dinner. He didn't think he'd done so since he was with Liliana. Not to mention he hadn't exactly been in a position of importance at the time. He kept wondering what the Rakdos gossipers would say about this if they found out.

Rounding the corner, he and Ral arrived at the place that he had remembered from some time ago. Jace thought Emmara had introduced him to it originally. He wasn't entirely sure why he'd picked it, apart from wanting somewhere vaguely neutral in terms of the Izzet and the Azorius, and preferably as far away from the Rakdos as possible. After a quick glance to the side at Ral, Jace increased his pace and approached the young elf standing outside to seat the patrons.

"Good evening," he said. "Table for two, please."

She smiled at him and nodded. "Coming early to avoid the rush?" she asked, without really appearing to expect an answer. "Please follow me."

She led the two of them to a sheltered alcove tucked away by the side of the building. There were flowering vines climbing on the wall around the table, which was tucked back away from the main area of the restaurant. The elf who had led them in handed them menus written in careful calligraphy on heavy paper. Jace took refuge in his for a moment, rather thankfully. He hadn't expected to feel quite so frustratingly vulnerable. He remembered feeling giddy and elated when he took Liliana out, as if the world were spinning on the tips of his fingers, but he didn't feel that way now. Instead, nerves were tugging oddly at his stomach. Which was stupid, since this wasn't even a date.

He stared down at the menu without seeing it for several minutes, before looking up to catch Ral's interested gaze, which sent him embarrassedly retreating back into the menu again immediately.

"What made you think of this place?" Ral asked. "Ever been here before?"

"Yes," Jace said automatically. "Not for a while, though. I haven't been able to afford it."

"How _did_ you make a living before becoming the Guildpact?" Ral asked. "You've been guildless all your life, haven't you?" It was _almost_ an insult, Jace could tell, but beyond the sting of the words, there was real curiosity in Zarek's tone.

"Yeah," Jace admitted. "I worked as a scribe for a while."

"You couldn't possibly have afforded this on a scribe's pay," Ral scoffed. "I've had to use them to transcribe equations before. They don't earn much."

"Yes, well, I wasn't always a scribe," Jace said, scratching his nose awkwardly.

Ral leaned forward, clearly interested. "So what happened?"

Shifting in his chair, Jace reached for his water, then sighed in defeat. "I—er—stopped thinking that blackmail was an acceptable method of earning a living," he said. He didn't feel like discussing his time with the Infinite Consortium right now.

Ral, who had been taking a sip from his glass, choked, spitting water all across the table. " _What_?" he said. "You're joking."

"In my defense, I was sixteen," Jace responded woodenly. "And it paid well."

"I suppose it would be absurdly easy to earn a living that way as a mind mage," Ral said meditatively. "Boring as sin, but—"

"It wasn't _that_ boring." Jace found himself bristling at this far more than he would have bristled at an insult to his youthful ethics. "I've always looked for puzzles in my free time more than in my job anyway. The Implicit Maze started as a hobby, you know."

The waiter arrived at that point, and the conversation halted while they ordered food and a bottle of something Jace suspected was going to be strong, on Ral's smirking suggestion.

"So, Jace," Ral said as the waiter departed with their order. "What exactly prompted you to ask me out to dinner? You don't strike me as the type to martyr yourself for a debt. Not sure what gives me that idea. Though perhaps that blackmailing you were talking about…"

"Do I need an ulterior motive to ask you out to dinner?"

"Do you have one?"

Groaning, Jace leaned back in his chair. "You asked me first!"

"Well, I didn't expect you to agree."

The conversation paused for the arrival of their wine, which came in an unmarked glass bottle with a fluted neck. Their waiter uncorked it and quietly poured first Jace's glass, then Ral's, before leaving again.

"Got any good gossip from the blackmail years?" Ral asked as Jace took a sip. He'd been right; it _was_ strong. Almost misleadingly so—a soft, fruity flavor burst onto his tongue at first, only followed a moment or two after he'd swallowed by the burning sensation he had expected.

"Good…what?" he echoed, Ral's words finally percolating into his head. At one point, Jace thought, he'd had a strong head for alcohol, but he hadn't had anything to drink in some time, and he wasn't sure how much tolerance he'd retained.

"You must have something," the Izzet mage grinned. "When was this? Can't have been that long ago."

"Seven or eight years?" Jace suggested. "No, gods, closer to ten. Fuck."

"So you're twenty-six," Ral said. "Good to know."

"Well, that's what I'd _guess_ ," Jace hedged.

"Oh, right. The mysterious mind mage whose mysterious past is mysteriously hidden from everyone, including himself. Tell me, Jace, did you do that to yourself?"

"How would I know?" Jace retorted, then paused. "Well, I never heard any gossip about you. I didn't know you even existed until the Implicit Maze."

"Pity," Ral sniffed. "But what about the rest of the Izzet? If you lived anywhere near the Tenth, you must have had some kind of interaction with the League."

"This may shock you, Ral, but—" Jace paused as Ral started sniggering. "Pun not intended." The sniggering continued. Jace sighed and continued speaking. "The Izzet do not actually, as a group, have a great deal of money that they are willing to lay their hands on quickly."

"Okay, admittedly most of us prefer _having_ hands," Ral admitted. "But seriously. Don't you have any stories?"

"Um…" Jace dredged his way through his own memories and finally managed to pull up something relevant. "Actually, yeah. I think I saw his name recently, too. Bori Andon? Wasn't he the person who failed to sign your request forms properly?"

Ral nodded. "You knew him?"

"Um," said Jace. " 'Knew' is a strong word. I may have been somewhat responsible for the failure of his second marriage."

There was a pause. "That was _you_?" Ral snorted into his wine-glass. "Krokt, I remember that. Hell, I think I remember your letters. We all read them—Bori was one of the senior mages and I'd just joined up a year or two before. He was an asshole." Ral chuckled. "Still is. An incompetent asshole. There were five of us junior mages working for him—me, Maree, Prax, Cob, and fuck. Alena, I think? We hated him."

"You…remember my letters?" Jace echoed.

"Sure. I mean, he was careful with them, but we'd figured out how to get into his desk. If we hadn't, he'd probably have gotten us killed. Had a bad habit of sending us into disputed territory without warning us in advance." Ral frowned. "Pretty sure I still have the scar where an undercity troll tried to take a bite out of my leg."

The conversation paused again for a moment as the waiter arrived with their dinner. Jace discovered that, for the first time in several weeks, he was extremely hungry, and the steak and dumplings was a welcome change of pace from his usual sandwich snatched hastily in between signing documents and meeting with unhappy guildmages.

In between bites, Jace studied Ral, trying not to look as if he was doing so. The Izzet mage ate with an air of casual unconcern, apparently paying little attention to his surroundings. He was staring vaguely at something off in the distance and had failed to notice that one of his long sleeves was being repeatedly dragged through his soup. Jace had to smother a smile and, once again, resist the very tempting urge to peer into his companion's mind. What was Ral thinking?

Since the failure of his romantic aspirations with Emmara, Jace hadn't really thought much about the subject. He'd been too busy with his new status as the Guildpact to bother much. And perhaps he had been put off by the knowledge that almost any romantic connection he could forge would suffer from the same problems as those he had experienced with Emmara. He was a planeswalker, and, even if he never left Ravnica, there would be an insurmountable gulf between him and one of the planebound. Perhaps he'd taken to heart some of the things Ral himself had said during the Implicit Maze.

But Ral Zarek _was_ a planeswalker. Ral would understand all the things that Jace wouldn't be able to tell anyone else. The moments of hesitation when he forgot, for a moment, what the currency was, one of the local customs. The moments of waking up dazed and disoriented as he struggled to make sure he knew where he was. The feeling—or non-feeling—of the Blind Eternities. It was just as the young leonin on Theros had said. They were—alike, in a way. They understood something that no one else did.

Jace shook his head and turned back to his dinner. What was he thinking? This—wasn't a date, was it? Not _really_. It was just—a dinner. He owed Ral, and it had amused him to take the man up on his first, hurried suggestion for paying him back. Jace fully intended to come up with a better thank-you at some point, probably involving redirecting some nice lab equipment in Ral's general direction. It was just a dinner, he repeated to himself. So why did he keep glancing up at Ral and feeling that sudden flip of his stomach as his eyes traced down the movements of Ral's muscular arm?

"We read them out loud," Ral said abruptly.

"What?" said Jace, caught off-guard, before realizing what Ral meant. When he did, he dropped his fork. "You _read them out loud_?"

"We thought they were hilarious!" Ral laughed into his soup. "They were always trying to sound vaguely menacing but they came across more like—hm—" He paused.

"A sixteen-year-old trying to sound vaguely menacing?" Jace laughed ruefully. "Still, it worked." Not that he was proud of it. But an odd feeling of nostalgia blossomed in his chest regardless.

"It worked because you had the information, not because you had a clue what you were doing."

"Well, at least you and your labmates got some fun out of them."

"Mmm," grinned Ral. "Did we ever. I take it you didn't get any money from him, though?"

Jace flushed guiltily. "Well. Not much, certainly."

"He tried pawning some of my equipment," Ral said reflectively.

"How did that go for him?" Jace asked.

Ral grinned, and lightning crackled down his gauntlet from his elbow to his fingertips. "About as well as you'd expect."

As the evening wore on, the conversation turned toward inconsequentials. Neither Ral nor Jace brought up their sojourn to the other plane, though there were a few moments that Jace suspected that his companion was thinking about it. Once, when Jace started laughing halfway through a drink of wine and choked, Ral was out of his chair in half an instant and around the table. He raised his hand to slap Jace on the back, paused, and dithered as Jace waved a hand at him and gasped for breath. As soon as the coughing fit had subsided, Ral bent over and peered into Jace's face.

"I'm fine," Jace said. "I just tried to drink and breathe at the same time."

"Well, that's stupid," Ral said, and Jace could smell the alcohol on his breath, but for some reason, he was more preoccupied with the fact that he could feel Ral's breath warm on his mouth. "Stop being stupid."

"Sorry," Jace managed. It was probably the alcohol that was making his face feel so hot.

"Excuse me," said the waiter. "Are you in the mood for dessert?"

Ral hastily made his way back to his seat, and he and Jace looked at each other. Finally, regretfully, Jace shook his head. His stomach would probably rebel if he tried to shove another bite into it, and he didn't feel like vomiting in front of Ral. "Can we just get the check, please?" He reached for his wallet and realized, to his irritation, that he'd left it in the pocket of his everyday trousers. "Actually, can you just send the bill to my office?" he asked, mildly frustrated.

"Your…office?" repeated the waiter, in a vaguely confused tone of voice.

Jace looked up. There was no recognition in the calm, green eyes that confronted him. "Yes, I'm the Living…Guildpact…" he trailed off. His papers were also in the pocket of his other trousers. He had spent so long in the ceremonial role that it hadn't occurred to him that anyone on Ravnica would fail to recognize him.

Glancing across to Ral, he saw the Izzet mage frowning as he patted down his own clothes, then shrugging and looking back at him, palms up and empty. The message was pretty clear. _You were supposed to pay for dinner_.

Technically, Jace supposed, the worst the restaurant owner was likely to do was summon the Azorius. Which meant that Lavinia would find out that he had snuck out of his perfectly safe quarters to go halfway across the city for the purposes of a da—a dinner. A small part of Jace noted that the amount of panic this thought stirred up was a complete overreaction. The rest of Jace responded by throwing up an invisibility spell and overlaying an illusion of himself and Ral, while the real Jace leaped out of his chair, grabbed Ral's hand, and bolted.

It was probably a testament to the number of terrible things that had happened to them in the past few days that they made it two blocks away from the restaurant before Ral slowed down, dragging Jace to a halt with him, and said, "What exactly was that about? You know, if you didn't want to pay, there are easier ways to avoid it."

As soon as he stopped running, Jace found himself gasping for breath, and he leaned sideways against the wall, chest heaving. "Oh Krokt," he said miserably. "Fuck. I'll need to pay them back. Fuck."

"Is there a reason that you, the extremely powerful mind mage, didn't just go into the waiter's head and convince them of the actually true fact that you are Jace Beleren, the Living Guildpact?" Ral asked.

Jace looked up at him and opened his mouth to retort, then shut it again. "Uh," he said, then straightened up and put a hand to his forehead. "Shit."

Ral started to smirk, but the smirk turned into a grin, and a moment later, he was leaning back against the wall, laughing so hard he could barely stand. He opened his mouth, apparently to speak, but all that came out was more laughter. After a moment, Jace started laughing as well. "I never claimed not to be forgetful," he managed between gasps.

"Guess I'd better walk you home, then," Ral smirked. "We wouldn't want you getting lost."

Jace looked down to see that, somehow, they were still holding hands. Well, fuck. So much for "not a date." He sighed, but didn't take his hand away as they began to move in the direction of his office. Ral's hand tightened for an instant in his, but the lightning mage didn't let go either.

They walked in somewhat companionable silence down a number of twisting streets until Ral said, "I did say I'd walk you _home_ , Beleren, and while I know you enjoy working long hours, perhaps something of a break is in order."

Jace paused for half a heartbeat, then shrugged. If Ral weren't completely trustworthy, he could easily have left him to die on the other plane. And it wasn't as if he'd see something he shouldn't. "My apartment is connected to my office." It was on the tip of his tongue to invite Ral up for coffee, but he wasn't quite ready to take that step. "I'll let you see it sometime."

"How generous," drawled Ral. "I'm sure your living quarters are—"

"—covered in artifacts from various different planes, whose functions are quite mysterious? That no one else on Ravnica has ever seen, much less touched?"

There was a speculative pause. "All right, you've got me, I'm interested."

"Good," said Jace, a sudden surge of warmth pooling in his stomach. "I—had a lot of fun tonight, and I'd—well—like to do it again sometime."

Ral was two or three inches taller than he was—most people, Jace felt, were two or three inches taller than he was—so he had to look up slightly as he pressed a quick kiss onto the corner of Ral's mouth. Not quite daring to look back and see how Ral had taken it, he immediately started to hurry away down the sidewalk, warmth blooming in his cheeks and adrenaline surging in his stomach

"Hey, Jace—" Ral's words and hand on his shoulder stopped him before he got more than two steps. "Hold still," the Izzet mage said, and Jace froze instinctively, confused and slightly alarmed. Ral's hand on his shoulder pulled and twisted, and he overbalanced and fell backwards, only to land securely in the crook of Ral's other arm, staring up in surprise at the lightning mage's grinning face.

"If you're going to kiss someone," Ral said. "Do it properly, Beleren."

Jace had less than a second to react, and then Ral was kissing him hard, lips moving roughly against his own. The stubble on Ral's chin scratched his, which was a new experience. Really, everything about tonight was a new experience, Jace thought hazily, before the feeling of Ral's lips stole the last of his ability to think. Ral's tongue slid across his lower lip, and his hands tangled in Ral's hair, coarse and sparking with tingling pinpricks of electricity. Ozone and salt burst across Jace's tongue as his lips parted and Ral's tongue lathed briefly through his mouth before withdrawing. Ral nipped briefly at his bottom lip, then set him back on his feet, but Jace's knees buckled, and he had to clutch at Ral's shoulder and lean forward to steady himself. A solid hand under his elbow held him securely.

Jace swallowed several times. "Right," he managed. "I'll remember that in future."

Ral was looking extremely smug. "Anyway," he said. "Have a good evening, Beleren."

Stepping back, Jace took a deep breath, trying to slow his racing heart. "You know," he said, before turning to leave for a second time, "you can call me Jace."


	11. Chapter 11

**A/N:** In which Jace and Lavinia discuss the logistics of relationships, Jace has an unexpected visitor, and Lavinia is inconvenienced.

 **Chapter Eleven**

Jace hunched over a pile of half-signed paperwork. He was very, very tired of looking at his desk. One of Lavinia's arresters had noticed his absence during his dinner with Ral, and Lavinia had quietly requested that he refrain from leaving his office without guards until they could find the attempted assassins. Jace had eventually given in and promised, which he was now regretting quite a lot. It had been nearly a week since he had seen anything other than the inside of his office.

For a little while in the morning, he had called up an illusion of the wilds near Utvara, but he was still tired, and he had been forced to let it drop when he needed to concentrate. With a sigh, he reached for the next paper, but paused as a light knock on the door heralded Lavinia's entrance.

"You know, Jace, you might consider taking a break at some point," she said mildly.

He frowned. "And do what?" he asked. "Do you have any leads on that assassin yet? I'm going crazy in here."

Lavinia put a light hand on his shoulder. "Jace, I promise I will tell you when we have an update."

Jace shook his head. "I heard bells," he said. "As if someone's thoughts had been replaced. Do you think it was the Dimir?"

"We have discussed this at least once a day since you returned, Guildpact. The devices that attacked you were of Izzet manufacture," Lavinia responded, "but it's entirely possible that their originator is a pawn of the Dimir, yes. Now is there anything you need?"

"I need to get out of here for a little while. I'm going crazy," Jace said again, a little more fiercely than he'd meant to.

"I don't think that would be advisable," said Lavinia, softly.

Jace grunted noncommittally. She was being perfectly reasonable, but his brain did not want to be reasonable right now. With a rough sigh, he tried to maneuver the conversation clumsily toward something else he had wanted to ask her about. "Lavinia," he said slowly, staring fixedly at the paper in front of him. "Er, I've been wondering. Is there—ah—any provision for romance between the Living Guildpact and a member of—" this was not subtle, there was no point in even trying for subtlety, "—a member of, say, the Izzet League?"

Lavinia made a tiny sound, which was probably a laugh that she had hastily turned into a cough. "Technically, by Azorius statute four-hundred-seven, and according to your _non-existent_ birth records, your status is officially 'guildless,' Jace." Jace winced. He knew that the lack of birth records was something of a sore point for his efficient friend. Lavinia continued after a moment of pointed silence, "There is no proscription forbidding a guildless person from having relations with a member of a guild in general. Certain guilds do place restrictions on romantic relationships or requirements for such romances to be approved; however, the Izzet League is not one of them. Furthermore, as the Guildpact was, until recently, non-sentient and non-sapient, there is no specific rule on the books one way or the other regarding your specific position. I would, however, advise caution. The political ramifications of a more public relationship might be—negative."

All of which had been approximately what Jace had expected her to say. "Is there anything you think I could do to, um, minimize those ramifications?"

Lavinia raised an eyebrow. "Discretion," she said succinctly. "There are already rumors about your love-life, Guildpact, and so far no one has become particularly incensed, except for the sort of people who become incensed as a matter of professional pride."

Jace blinked. " 'Professional pride?' " he reiterated.

Lavinia gave him a small smile. "I was thinking of some of the customers of the Rakdos gossip purveyors," she responded.

Jace, who had in his more sordid past occasionally provided content to said purveyers, considered the kinds of things that might be said about a relationship between the Living Guildpact and an Izzet guildmage, and cringed. "I'll be discreet," he said hurriedly. "Hypothetically, if someone were to try and blackmail me…"

"Technically speaking, blackmail as such is not illegal. There are a number of restrictions that a clever arrester could probably bring against such a person, but by the nature of blackmail…" Lavinia trailed off for a moment, and Jace nodded uncomfortably, his imagination throwing up a number of unpleasant possibilities once more. "I can see you follow my drift, Guildpact. If such a thing were to happen, I would advise you to come directly to me."

"Thank you," Jace said sincerely. "I really appreciate that."

Lavinia leaned over him and gave him a conspiratorial wink. "I've had occasion to be concerned about such things myself," she said. "My own, er, involvement is inter-guild and might cause some—comment. Fortunately, my partner exerts a good deal of control over the flow of the gossip channels."

This was the first Jace had heard about Lavinia being romantically involved with anyone, and it took nearly all his strength of will not to satisfy his curiosity by peering into her skull. "You really need to tell me more than that," he said.

"At some point, Guildpact. The relationship is in its early stages, and I wouldn't want to jeopardize it—not even to satisfy your insatiable curiosity."

Jace blushed. "Sorry," he murmured.

"I did say I'd tell you at some point," Lavinia replied mildly. "And in return, you really must promise to tell me if anything happens between you and Guildmage Zarek."

"Er," said Jace.

"Ohhh?" said Lavinia.

"The, er, the evening I was gone…"

Lavinia's eyebrows were expressive. "I see," she said, with interest.

Jace gave her a conciliatory smile. "I didn't think you'd want to know that I'd been out."

"Only because I didn't want you to _be_ out."

"Details." Jace waved an airy hand.

"Yes, I'd like them," Lavinia answered immediately, and he was forced to chuckle. "You seem busy now, though. Shall I let you get on with your paperwork?"

He sighed heavily. "I suppose so."

"If I come across anything more interesting that requires your attention, I promise you that I will bring it to you immediately," Lavinia said, pausing at the door to his office. "Just—please give us a little more time, Jace. You nearly died."

He nodded with some chagrin. "Yes, all right."

As the door shut behind her, he sighed and turned back to the pile of papers in front of him.

* * *

It was an hour or two later when the door opened again. "Lavinia," Jace said without looking up, "I really need a break. If I don't get out of this room, I might summon a dragon to rip it apart."

"Jace." It wasn't Lavinia. Jace turned in shock at the sound of the soft, familiar voice. Emmara Tandris wore a simple, sleeveless dress of dark, dyed cloth. The unusual color faded her already pale skin and made her seem almost ghostlike, her fair hair tied back severely from her boney face. Her eyes were red, her hands clutched nervously in the folds of her dress. She looked very small and vulnerable. "Are you all right?" she continued.

"I—" The sight of her plucked painfully at his heart, but he managed to pull himself together. "It's good to see you," he said awkwardly. "Yes—I'm fine."

She crossed the room in a few quick strides and reached out for him, but he leaned instinctively backward, and Emmara's face crumpled slightly with pain. "Jace, what did I do?" she croaked.

"What?"

"You're surprised to see me." It wasn't a question. "You're actually surprised that I came to make sure that you weren't hurt, after all of Ravnica heard about the attacks."

"Emmara, I—just—" Jace stalled a little. "I didn't think you'd want to—"

"What? You didn't think I'd want to make sure my closest friend was still alive?" She bit out the words. "After my lover was replaced by a Dimir infiltrator and killed without my knowledge, you thought what? That I wouldn't have time for one of my oldest friends?"

"It's just that I'm—"

"Don't you dare say _human_." Jace, who had almost said, 'a planeswalker', shut his mouth, half in shame, half in fear of what he would say if he let himself talk. "Have I ever treated you differently?" Emmara asked. "Tell me, Jace, was _that_ why you stopped talking to me when I needed you?"

Another unpleasant stab of pain in the general vicinity of Jace's heart. "Emmara—I thought—you would need time," he said. Which was not entirely true, but was the closest thing to the truth he could say without breaking several promises he had made to both himself and to her. "I'm sorry," he added, helplessly. Standing up, he opened his arms and his mind—not enough to see her thoughts, but enough to feel what she was feeling. Her grief and anger beat at him like the wings of a caged bird against its bars.

Emmara stared for a long moment and then stepped forward slowly, burying her face in the front of his shirt, her anger melting away in an instant. "I missed you," she whispered. "You're my friend, Jace."

He put a careful hand on her hair. Standing like this, she was so small, but his image of Emmara was large and expansive, like the house she had welcomed him into when he was barely more than a child. "I'm sorry," he said again. He might need someone to know his secrets, but he and Emmara had been friends long before Jace had had anyone else to turn to. One person couldn't be everything—and he'd turned his back on her in her grief, for brutally selfish reasons. Guilt twisted at his stomach. He wanted to apologize again, but instead he just held Emmara and let her cry.

"I was worried about you," she said fiercely. "I thought I'd lost—I thought I'd lost my last friend."

Jace bit his lip. "I thought—when you joined the Conclave—I suppose I thought you didn't need me anymore."

"Oh, Jace," she said miserably into his shirt-front. "Aren't you the mind-reader?"

"I'm clearly not a very good one," Jace said. "I'm really sorry, Emmara."

"I'm just glad you're not dead," she said. "It would be harder to make you apologize if you were dead."

"I'm also glad that I'm not dead," Jace agreed. "But I should have been there for you." He stepped back and took her hands in his. "Is there any way I can make it up to you?"

Emmara looked up with a watery smile. "Actually, there is one thing," she said.

* * *

Lavinia sighed as she settled her sword onto her hip. She was off duty for the evening, but she didn't entirely like to leave Jace. She was aware that Arrester Flavia and the others under her command were perfectly competent, but her brain was crowded with irrational fears. Still, she could hardly just give up sleeping until they had caught whoever it was who was trying to kill Jace. An exhausted guard might be worse than no guard at all.

She started down the alley she normally took as a shortcut back to her apartment. Mulling over the difficult situation and staring at her feet intently, she nearly walked right into the black carriage blocking her way. Stepping back with a surprised intake of breath, she narrowly avoided being struck in the face by the opening door.

"Please enter the carriage and put on this blindfold," said someone from the dim interior.

Lavinia took a cautious step back. "I don't have time for this," she said.

"Please enter the carriage and put on this blindfold," the voice said again, using precisely the same intonation. A hand dropped onto Lavinia's shoulder from somewhere behind her, urging her forward, and she complied this time. She decided not to look back at what the hand was attached to.

The blindfold smelled stale and dusty, and Lavinia did not get a look at whoever—or whatever—helped her affix it over her eyes. During the short carriage ride, which was not uncomfortable, she took careful mental notes of the route, so that by the time she was helped out, she knew exactly where she was. The slight rounding of the cobblestones beneath her worn boots reaffirmed her suspicions as she was helped out and led into a cold room with a narrow doorway.

"Please undress," said the monotonous voice of the creature that had put on her blindfold. Lavinia ground her teeth, but complied slowly. A cold hand brushed against her shoulder as something took her clothes, then against her side as a thin strip of cloth was wound around her, across her breasts. The process was repeated with another strip that was tied rather intricately around her lower half.

"Please walk with us," said the voice, and Lavinia complied, the cold of the floor seeping up through the naked soles of her feet. They walked through several corridors, passing close to several other people, whom Lavinia could hear but not see from behind the blindfold. Finally, after a number of twists and turns and at least one staircase, on which she nearly twisted an ankle thanks to a loose stone, she was taken through two sets of heavy double-doors, and the guiding hand on her shoulder was removed.

"Thank you," said a female voice. "You may go." The door opened and shut behind Lavinia. "You can take off the blindfold if you want," the same voice said, sounding amused.

Lavinia reached up, clawed it off, and glared at the occupant of the chair in front of her, whose eyes were traveling appreciatively up and down her form. "Goddammit," she said. "I was going to go home and rest."

"There's a robe on the wall," said the woman in the chair, wincing slightly as she shifted one leg. "I apologize for the manner of your conveyance here."

"Teysa, I swear, if you don't have a good reason for this—" growled Lavinia. "I would have killed both your thrulls if I hadn't recognized the voice."

The Orzhov envoy smiled faintly. "I doubt anyone would look twice at a young woman blindfolded and dressed as you are right now within these walls," she said. "An Azorius arrester, though, might cause comment."

Lavinia shrugged on the soft robe hanging on the wall and burrowed into it. "C-cold," she said, her teeth chattering. "Why did you want to see me?"

Teysa rose slowly, favoring her bad leg. "Do I need a reason?" she asked, crossing the room and putting a hand on Lavinia's shoulder. She leaned up to kiss the Azorius arrester on the cheek.

"If this is a date, I'd rather have a warning first," Lavinia grumbled.

"It's not just that," Teysa responded, leaning on the other woman's arm. "I have heard some—troubling rumors in the past few days."

"You mean like the near-death of the Living Guildpact because his bodyguard is useless?" Lavinia asked brightly.

"Oh, my dear girl," said Teysa. "Don't be too hard on yourself. From what I've seen of our Guildpact, he dives headfirst into trouble like a dragon into its hoard."

"Yes," Lavinia agreed grimly.

"Would you like something to drink?" the Orzhov mage asked. "In any case, I merely wanted to know how the investigation is going."

"No, thank you," Lavinia responded to the first question, then gave the other woman a frustrated look. "It's—not, really. We know the culprit must be a member of the Izzet, but there simply aren't any other leads."

Teysa patted her on the arm, heading slowly across the room toward what Lavinia knew was a discreet liquor cabinet. "Sometimes you're adorably naïve," she said. "There are always leads, if you are willing to pay the price necessary to find them."

"Do you have any actual wisdom to impart? Or just vague platitudes?"

"My sources concur that it is a member of the Izzet."

"You don't think that it _is_ Zarek, do you?"

Teysa shook her head. "There is some suggestion of Dimir complicity. It was not, I think, a terribly serious attempt, if the Dimir are to blame. Perhaps they were testing the waters? In any case, had Zarek been responsible, I do not imagine you would have seen the Guildpact again after the two of them disappeared together. He doesn't play that kind of game."

At the mention of House Dimir, Lavinia's hand instinctively dropped to her belt before remembering that her sword was back in whatever dressing room Teysa's thrull had taken her to. "Do you have any proof?"

"Unfortunately, not yet," replied Teysa, pouring herself a glass of something amber that was probably strong. "I just wanted to warn you to be on your guard."

Lavinia awkwardly followed her across the room and squeezed her elbow before bending to kiss the shorter woman's cheek. "Well, thank you," she said. "I do appreciate it." She smirked. "Jace was asking me about the—logistics—of relationships today."

Teysa sighed, and Lavinia felt the Orzhov envoy lean back against her. "Is _this_ Zarek?" she asked.

"I never said Jace had good taste," Lavinia pointed out in amusement.

"You're sure it's not Tandris?"

"I'm very sure," Lavinia said, sadly. "Which is a pity, because she might actually instill a little caution in him."

"Zarek would not be my first choice for discretion," Teysa said meditatively. "Still, the man is brave and proud. And loyal, though he doesn't let anyone know it. The Guildpact could do much worse. In fact, certain of my sources say he has."

"You and your sources," Lavinia mocked. "I think you—"

A measured knock on the door interrupted her statement before she could finish it. She groaned in irritation, but Teysa squeezed her arm and made for an ornate cane leaning against the wall. She hobbled quickly across the room and over to the door, which she opened only slightly to lean out and talk. A few low words were exchanged, and she turned back to Lavinia, looking worried. "There are reports of a break-in at the Guildpact's office," she said.

"Get me my clothes," snapped Lavinia.


	12. Chapter 12

**A/N:** In which Ral irritates Lavinia, and Jace and Ral geek out together.

 **Chapter Twelve**

Jace laid his aching head on the desk, trying to slow his breathing. He had managed to keep himself from collapsing until Emmara had left, but he was paying the price now. Despite how carefully she had tried to contain it, her sorrow and mourning had shaken him to the core, and that, combined with the effort of threading into her memories and cross-referencing the subconscious responses in her memories of Calomir, had left him miserable and exhausted.

Emmara couldn't have had any idea what she was asking of him. And she would have accepted it if he had told her that determining the last thing the real Calomir had said to her was beyond even his formidable capabilities, just as she would have accepted a simple lie. But Jace felt that he owed it to her to find the truth.

It had taken over an hour, but finally, he was able to tease out an evening that ended with a murmured declaration of love and a "sleep well" from Calomir. Feeling sick-at-heart and heavy, he'd brought the memory to the forefront of her mind, and the gratitude on her face was enough that he felt he'd taken a step toward mending their friendship and eradicating his own guilt. When she'd left, he'd collapsed. Maybe tomorrow, he would have the energy to excise the quick flashes of Emmara's naked body from his mind, but for the time being, he thought he would just have to live with them.

He was dazed enough that, though he heard the sound of the door opening, he didn't register what it was until the person who had opened it was directly behind him.

"Zap," said Ral Zarek, putting a hand on Jace's shoulder. "You're dead."

"What?" Jace asked miserably, slowly lifting his painful head from its place on the desk to turn and look at the Izzet mage.

"Your guards are not very useful," Ral said. "I barely had to try to get past them."

"Don't move, Zarek," snapped Lavinia's voice from the doorway.

"Aren't you a little late?" Ral asked easily, his hand still resting on Jace's shoulder. "If I had actually been trying to assassinate him, the Guildpact would be dead by now. It wouldn't mean much if you caught the perpetrator afterwards."

"Wait," Jace said slowly, trying to piece this together in his head. "Ral, you're here because you—wanted to show Lavinia that her precautions were insufficient?"

"I don't care what he's doing here," Lavinia said stonily. "Guildmage Zarek, even if I believe that you had no intention of harming the Living Guildpact, you are in violation of at least four laws and regulations, immediately after having been under investigation on charges of suspected kidnapping, and you have left two of my arresters stunned outside the door. Do you really think this was your wisest course of action?"

Ral took half a step forward, his hand moving out to the side. Jace was struck by the protectiveness of his position, and wondered if Ral had noticed it himself. "I think that me getting in here was by far the best-case scenario for Ja—the Guildpact," Ral said in an icy tone of voice.

Lavinia glared at him, and Jace, with a mental sigh at the effort, managed to lever himself out of the chair. "Could you two both stop fighting over what's best for me without asking me?" he said quietly. "And don't bother to pretend that your motives are altruistic—no, not even yours, Lavinia. I am a mind mage, after all." As they sputtered, Jace tried to push back the headache enough to speak coherently. He adopted what he hoped looked like a confident posture, while really standing so that his desk would prop him up. "You are both my friends," he continued. "And I'm aware that you care about me. But you have got to stop acting as if I am incapable of taking care of myself—"

"Incidents in the last few weeks would suggest otherwise," Ral pointed out snidely.

Jace fixed him with a sideways glare. "—to the point where you are jeopardizing my safety by not telling me things or letting me leave this room."

Lavinia huffed an angry sigh through her nostrils. "Jace," she said pleadingly.

Jace sighed. "If I die of claustrophobia, it won't matter to the people trying to kill me. And if you and Guildmage Zarek do not stop squabbling, you're liable to be more harm than help."

"But he—" Lavinia protested just as Ral put in, "But she—" They stopped and glared at each other.

Jace sighed. "If we could just solve the problem of the bells…" he murmured softly.

"Bells?" Ral echoed sharply.

"I heard bells in the attacker's head," Jace explained. "Lavinia believes it's evidence of a Dimir sleeper agent."

"Guildpact, would you please refrain from telling outsiders about the details of internal investigations?" Lavinia said in irritation.

"Maybe you should tell more outsiders about it, since apparently the Azorius are incompetent enough not to have arrested the perpetrator by now," snarled Ral. "Bori Andon. He was carrying around a silver bell with him and he stopped in and saw me just before I met Jace for dinner. I would bet you half my experimental equipment—which the Azorius still haven't returned—that he put a spy machine of some kind on my clothing. We're just lucky he didn't try to kill Jace _again_."

Lavinia opened and shut her mouth into a thin line. "Thank you for the information, Guildmage Zarek," she said frostily. "It will be taken into consideration. Now, perhaps, if you would not mind leaving, I will see what can be done about the charges leveled against you. In light of your help in this matter, I may be able to minimize or dismiss them."

Jace could see Ral mulling over the order, and decided to push him in the direction of least confrontation. "I need to get some sleep," he said. "It's been a very long, tiring day. If we can put this damn assassin into prison, I'll come by your lab as soon as I can, Ral."

Ral's hand tightened on Jace's shoulder, and he took in a long, irritated-sounding breath. "Yeah, all right," he said finally. "Arrester Lavinia, I hope your Azorius guards won't have _too_ much difficulty dealing with Andon."

Lavinia made an indescribable noise, and Jace hastened to smooth things over. "I'm certain they'll do fine," he said. "Now, I really would like to get some sleep, if you don't mind—"

"Of course, Guildpact," Lavinia said firmly. "I will escort Guildmage Zarek out and send someone to conduct you to your apartment at your leisure."

Ral gave a soft snort, but nodded as well.

* * *

There were boxes piled to the ceiling. While it was technically true that, by now, the Azorius had returned every piece of confiscated equipment—Ral had a very long list to prove it—they hadn't bothered to unpack it, and it was almost certainly now completely out of order. Oh, it was surely in some kind of order—what kind of Azorius worth their salt would fail to take the opportunity to organize anything?—but probably not the kind of order that Ral would be able to figure out, and, thus, not a terribly useful sort of order at all.

In the meantime, he was kicking his heels trying to get himself to go through the entire giant pile and move it back to places in his lab where it would be able to perform useful functions again, but so far he hadn't been able to muster the energy. Azorius arresters had been swarming in and out all day, conducting interviews in the wake of the arrest of Bori Andon under suspicion of 'Dimir complicity.' Ral himself had had to put up with a number of extremely uncomfortable sessions with Niv-Mizzet; the Firemind was not pleased about Andon, or about Ral's lack of results over the past few weeks. He didn't take kindly to excuses like "I had no equipment," and Ral was left feeling faintly harassed and, paradoxically, terribly unmotivated.

A knock on the door made him start to get up and then collapse lethargically back into his chair. No doubt it would be another of the weirds Maree kept sending up with offers to help him unpack. Ral disliked weirds. Even the most intelligent ones were too literal for his taste, and most of them were little more than one-trick ponies. "Go away!" he called.

The door opened. "Is that any way to talk to the incarnation of law and order on Ravnica?" Jace asked mildly.

"Oh," said Ral. "It's you again. I should have known."

"For someone who was willing to stand up to multiple gods for me—not to mention a detention sphere—you're not very welcoming."

Ral grunted. "I never said I wanted you to _die_ ," he said plaintively. "Just to go away."

"If you really want me to leave, I will. I was going to offer you some help with your equipment, though—I heard Lavinia saying something about alphabetizing it? Which occurred to me might not be optimal for scientific enquiry."

"Ah, the great bureaucratic master of scientific enquiry," Ral said snidely, swiveling around in his chair, wondering why exactly he was being so rude all of a sudden. The kiss he had given Jace replayed in his mind, sudden and forceful, and his eyes slid away from the mind mage, hoping he would stay out of Ral's head.

"You know, I have been the Guildpact for a comparatively short period of time," Jace said smoothly.

"Ah, yes, before that you were a blackmailer. Very scientific."

"I'm sure that having a person who literally knows where you want something to be before you do would be _completely_ useless to have around while unpacking."

Ral swiveled around to face him again. "Stay out of my head, Beleren."

"So it's back to 'Beleren' now? Consistent." Before Ral could retort again, Jace sighed and leaned against the door. "If I were in your head right now—and I'm not—I'd think you were getting defensive, Zarek."

"What possible reason could I have for getting defensive, mind mage?" Ral asked coldly.

"The fact that you put your life on the line for someone several times in the past week?" Jace said quietly. "Not to mention went to dinner with, which I'd hazard a guess you enjoyed. But I suspect neither of those are things you're used to doing. Me being a mind mage bothers you because you don't trust _people_ , Ral. Not because you don't trust _me_."

Ral growled. "Don't flatter yourself. I don't trust you."

"You don't want to."

Getting to his feet, Ral shrugged and moved across the room to the boxes. "If you're really not going to leave, you might as well make yourself useful. Stay out of my head unless you want another scar, though."

Even without sharing a mind, Jace was more help than Ral had anticipated. He was quiet and methodical, but not in an offensively Azorius way. He was also reasonably good about not being in Ral's way when the Izzet mage was unpacking. After an hour or two of work, the lab was starting to look almost like itself again.

"Ral?" Jace asked. "What's this?" He indicated a large box with trailing wires and the letters _FLUX_ scrawled across the side in Ral's messy handwriting.

"Oh, that," said Ral. It was ironic to see Jace kneeling beside that particular failed project. "Maree was trying to make a machine to read brain patterns. Didn't work."

"A mind magic machine? How was it supposed to work?" Jace sounded far more interested than Ral would have expected. Leaning over Jace's shoulder, he grimaced down at the mess of wires unfolding underneath the Guildpact's hands.

"We tried to write some equations that would let it echo the patterns of electricity inside your head," he said. "But it never managed to hold together a coherent standing wave."

"What did the equations look like?" Jace asked. Ral glanced at him with a raised eyebrow. "What? I have some experience with mana theory. I haven't spent my entire life blackmailing people."

Ral grunted skeptically, but moved to the chalkboard that formed one wall of the room and began to write. Jace followed him over and stood on his tiptoes to peer over his shoulder. "You're short," Ral commented with a smile.

"I was—undernourished as a child," Jace said defensively.

"Oh? How would you know?"

The Living Guildpact made an angry noise, but instead of moving away, rested his chin on Ral's shoulder, much to the other's surprise. "What's this?" he asked.

"That's Nekulai's flux equation," Ral answered. "Best description I came up with. But I couldn't get an analytical solution, and the machine kept coming up with infinities."

Jace's chin moved, and Ral glanced to the side to see that he was chewing on his knuckle. "What kind of boundary conditions?" he asked after a minute.

Ral sighed. "I tried periodic, fixed, linear, and Charlez polynomials."

"I have no idea what that last one is, but—" Reaching up to a piece of the chalkboard that remained pristine and uncovered by scribbles, Ral wrote the formula. It took several minutes. When he was done, Jace whistled. "That _is_ complex. Are they orthogonal?"

"Yeah. Perfectly fine basis set if you want to use them that way. Not that that helped. I eventually decide the damn thing wasn't separable and gave up."

Jace continued to stare and chew lazily on his thumb. "Did you try any solutions?"

Ral grunted and reached for a scrap of paper. "That's the list down this page here. I tried everything I could think of. Look—we're not going to get anywhere. Might as well just throw this piece of junk out."

"No, no, wait. I want to look at it some more." Ral glanced to the side. Jace looked genuinely interested.

"Suit yourself. I'll go unpack the rest."

Jace slithered to a squatting position and leaned back, staring intently at the chalkboard. With a slight shrug, Ral headed back to finish cobbling his derivian-meter back together. He was going to need more manalines.

Groups of weirds had been in and out several times, and Jace still hadn't really moved. Ral was impressed. He tended to fidget when he was focusing on a problem, but Jace hadn't budged, except to lick his lips and move his fingers slightly. His eyes were glowing very faintly blue, and, sometime when Ral was distracted reorganizing manalines, he had started sketching equations in mid-air. His mental handwriting was scratchy and elongated, but surprisingly clear. Ral wondered if he did this often when he was working on a problem—it was fascinating to watch, as variables and numbers disappeared, reappearing in different locations or slightly modified.

Most of the equations were lines of thought Ral himself had tried out and exhausted, and Jace wasn't traversing them any faster than he had, but it was still enjoyable to watch. Ral felt the problem drawing him in again, as he slowly laid down his hammer and pliers and walked over to sit behind Jace. After all, a fresh perspective was always good.

He was staring at a summation symbol when one of the numbers ticked up. Ral frowned. He hadn't looked at this problem in months, but he was pretty sure _that_ was new. "How many dimensions are you working in?" he asked.

"Hm?" said Jace, abstractly. The illusions flickered dangerously, and he raised a hand for the first time, grimacing slightly. "I started in three, but it didn't feel right."

"It didn't _feel_ right?" Ral echoed. It was something he might have said, but it was surprising to hear from his methodical companion.

"Mm, that sounds a little strange, I know," Jace said, frowning, his eyes glowing more brightly. "But I've been in a lot of minds, and I don't think you get enough information in three dimensions. I mean there's time to begin with, and that doesn't really get treated differently—"

"I did try a four-dimensional version for a little while, but it was even more complex," Ral interrupted.

"What about five?" Jace asked. "I think something cancels, I just can't quite see—"

"Fuck," breathed Ral, heading for the chalkboard. He broke two pieces of chalk trying to write quickly. "Dammit." Variables filled his head, flashed in front of his eyes. If he started with five—then the equations grew more complex—but the symmetry changed. _Five_ wasn't a number Ral associated with symmetry—two or four was much more common, but still, this wasn't hard, this wasn't groundbreaking, this was _stupidly easy_. How had Jace seen this when he hadn't? Months in the lab, working on this, and the damn Guildpact had waltzed in and in one day—

Ral rounded on him, to see the wide-eyed wonder poorly hidden in Jace's eyes. The stab of irritation was instantly replaced with something closer to gratitude. "You are too damn intelligent," he growled, and he crossed the room to put out a hand to Jace and help him up. "Do you want to stick around and help me put this thing back together? I need a knowledgable test subject."

Jace grinned at him. "I'm not sure I want to be a test subject," he said. "But I can stick around for a little longer. Just for you."

"You're not interested in the machine at all?"

Jace smirked. "Just for you," he repeated.


	13. Chapter 13

**A/N:** In which Jace visits Emmara, Jace and Ral work on the flux machine, and Ral tells Jace to read his mind.

 **A/N II:** This chapter is probably still rated T, but it does skirt the upper-level boundary of T. You have been warned.

 **Chapter Thirteen**

Taking a deep breath, Jace drew his cloak more tightly around him as he reached up to knock on Emmara's door. His head was buzzing with equations, and he was slightly dizzy, floating on ideas—or maybe that was the lack of sleep. Well, either way.

"Jace!" Emmara exclaimed delightedly as she opened the door. "What a nice surprise."

He smiled back. "I have a somewhat strange request," he said. "Although if you're pleased to see me, maybe I could come in for some tea as well?"

"Always," she said, stepping aside for him.

It had been some time since Jace had been in Emmara's house, and it was the scent that he noticed first. The smell of flowers and incense was a little weaker than it used to be, but it was still enough to make him remember evenings spent there as Berrim, taking a much-needed break from—Jace coughed in embarrassment as some of his less savory memories floated to the surface.

The decorations hadn't changed much. The hallways were still bursting with greenery and plant life, the china dolls still seated in their places of honor along the high, wooden shelves. Some of the dolls were different, Jace was sure—it was a testament to the number of times he had walked these rooms that he thought he could tell which ones.

In the high, light arboretum, soft birdsong wafted through the room, and Jace found himself almost lost in the loveliness of it all. With the furniture artfully hidden among blooming plants and the muted sunlight filtering through shaded glass, it was very peaceful. Almost too peaceful, he had to admit. Restful for a short time, but Jace wondered how long he would feel comfortable staying.

Emmara showed him to one of the tables nestled amidst a little grove of trees. "The tea will be out shortly," she said with a smile, and he wondered whether there were other people here—Conclave members who would know Emmara's mind almost before she did (and that might be a problem, given what he had come here to say)—or simply servants, too practiced and efficient at their jobs to be seen.

"I have something to tell you," Jace said. He had intended to be calm, collected, and mature while talking to her. Instead, he felt like a fifteen-year-old again.

Emmara must have sensed something of his inner turmoil, because she leaned forward, cupping her hands together eagerly. "What is it, Jace?"

"I, um," said Jace, taking a breath to steady his nerves. "I think I may be seeing someone. I'm not entirely sure yet."

Emmara's eyebrows went up, and she chuckled lightly. "You're not sure?"

He had to laugh as well. "We've gone out to dinner once. Beyond that, we've spent the entire time closeted in his lab, working on a project."

"It's been a long time since you were so involved in research, hasn't it?" She reached out and gently touched Jace's cheek. It still felt fragile and delicate, this reforming camaraderie between them, but it was growing stronger.

He nodded. "Fascinating subject," he said, by way of explanation.

"Your research or your companion?" Emmara asked archly, and Jace looked down at his hands. "Just a moment," she continued, motioning to someone behind him, and the next instant, a cup of hot tea was placed gently between his hands. The servant walked around the table and handed a cup of tea to Emmara as well, and Jace sat in awkward silence until he was certain they were alone again.

"So who is this mysterious companion, and what is the favor you want from me?" asked Emmara, sipping her tea slowly.

Jace shifted uneasily. "Ah, do you remember Guildmage Zarek?" he asked.

As he'd feared, Emmara's thin eyebrows rose into her hair. "I do," she responded guardedly.

"Yes, well, er," said Jace. "We had occasion to—work together—and he, um, apologized." Seeing that Emmara still looked skeptical, he continued. "It's also thanks to him I'm not dead right now." Quietly, he undid the front of his shirt. She gave a small, shocked exclamation as he revealed the jagged, inflamed scar running down his chest. "You heard about the attack, I know," he continued. "You may not know that Ral was the one who got me to safety afterwards. And also restarted my heart. If he hadn't been there—I would have died." The truth of that statement rang hollow and heavy in Jace's mouth.

"Then I owe him a debt of gratitude," Emmara said, her voice shaking only slightly. "I'll bow to your judgment of him, Jace. For the time being, at least."

Jace heard the faint, unspoken 'as long as he doesn't hurt you,' and gave her a grateful smile. He sipped at his tea for a moment before getting up the courage to continue to his awkward request. "The thing is," he said carefully. "It may not be safe for me or Guildmage Zarek if I am too—obvious—about my visits. You're already known to be my friend, and you won't argue if the Azorius ask you to go into protective custody."

A faint smile. "True," Emmara said amusedly. "What can I do for you, Jace?"

"If you wouldn't mind occasionally hosting an illusion of myself for tea," Jace said. "I feel that would allay suspicion as to where I'm going and make it less likely for rumors to start."

Emmara nodded. "Do you need anything other than the use of my house? I would rather not sit around talking to thin air any more than necessary."

He shook his head. "I don't think so," he said. "My illusion can bring a book or some papers to work on. I don't think it will cause much comment if I start spending a little more time here."

"Well, I'm certainly happy to help. But, Jace—" she paused, continuing only after he gave her an inquiring look. "—be careful," she finished.

"Of course."

* * *

Ral hummed quietly to himself as he finished the last touches on the wiring of the flux machine. "There," he said, stepping backward, and looking over at Jace, who was bent over the desk, signing something again. "Done. Ready for testing."

Jace looked up, his eyes focusing intently in a way Ral had grown to associate during the last few weeks with a kind of contained excitement. "And you're positive this won't fry my brain?" the mind mage asked lightly.

"I'd test it on myself, but—" Ral grimaced slightly. "—I think you'll have better luck calibrating it."

"What's that?" Jace asked, with a needling little smirk. "Something you think I'll be good at? How kind of you to say, Guildmage Zarek."

"Just get in the damn chair," grumped Ral, but not without a quick smile. The past few weeks had been—different. Ral was used to inspiration striking him at odd moments, spending long days grinding through equations with no ideas. He wasn't used to someone else steadying him when his inspiration started to flag. He wasn't used to having someone else there whose quick, intelligent questions could cut to the heart of the matter and keep him away from degenerating into a frustrated slump that might take days to shake off.

As Jace moved across the room, he brushed past Ral, and the lightning mage's heart thumped and constricted, sudden and disconcerting and immediate, but he shook it off and went over to connect the various bits of wire to Jace's head.

Jace leaned back gingerly in the chair. "What are the flat bits for?" he asked.

Ral picked one of them up, covered it in a layer of a sticky substance he had stolen from one of his colleague's labs for this purpose, and pressed it against Jace's forehead. "You don't want lightning going directly into your brain," he said. "Unless you'd like to drop the 'living' part of your title, Guildpact."

Jace squirmed, and Ral had to pause what he was doing to watch the movement of the other's hips. "Oh," Jace said. "No. Thank you."

Shaking his head to dislodge the distraction—this wasn't the time—Ral continued to afix the wires to Jace's head in a slightly wobbly ring. Then he moved around to the back of the machine, which was already humming with power, and attached the second set of wires to the head of the weird that Guildmage Maree had lent him. It seemed like a good calibration test to see if the machine would let Jace control something that was explicitly mindless.

Ral barely restrained himself from taking a deep breath. He wasn't nervous. He knew this machine. He had built it from the ground up, with _minimal_ help. "Ready?" he asked Jace, who did take a deep breath, then nodded.

"Yes," he said firmly, and Ral flipped the switch.

He felt the surge of mana that responded, a tumultuous torrent of red. In the chair, Jace gasped, and his body arced backwards, head snapping back against the headrest. He gave a soft, pained whimper, and Ral fumbled to turn the machine off, but the switch was stuck. Ral swore, his voice loud in the eerily silent room, and went to find the main power source. He could cut it if he needed to, but it might overload. As he dithered over whether that would be better or worse than leaving it on, the mind mage's voice echoed, breathless, in Ral's head. _It's all right. I'm all right._

Ral hurried back around to the front of the chair, where sweat was already starting to trickle down Jace's forehead, his eyes squinted forcefully shut. His tattoos were flickering rapidly bright and dim. "You don't look all right," Ral pointed out, noting, with some surprise, that his heart seemed to be thumping in his ears so loudly he could hear almost nothing else.

 _Just—a lot._ Jace's mental voice was strained. _Need to rewire some of the equations._ _Waiting for the machine to—ow—settle_.

It was true that Ral had predicted an equilibration period. He just hadn't expected it to have quite such a dramatic effect on the machine's occupant. Leaning over the chair, still not quite sure if he should leave Jace like this, he noted that this probably meant the machine would need more tweaking to be usable by anyone other than an accomplished telepath.

After what, according to Ral's chronometer, was six minutes and fourteen seconds, but felt significantly longer, Jace's eyes snapped open, glowing bright blue, and his body relaxed slightly. Something touched Ral's shoulder, and he whirled around to see the weird they had connected, lips drawn back in a very un-weird-like grin. "Got it," it said in Jace's voice.

"Fuck," breathed Ral.

"What, didn't you believe your own machine would work?"

"Of course I did. It's just impressive to see it in action," Ral responded immediately.

"Ah, of course." There was a blue flicker in the air, and the weird's outline was obscured by Jace's own—well, almost. Ral glanced toward the form slumped in the chair.

"Did you give yourself more muscles, Beleren?"

The illusion flickered. "What? No!"

"You did." Ral grinned, advancing on the weird. "Now why would you do that?"

"I-I don't know what you're talking about." Jace was starting to sound flustered.

"How are your perceptions in there?" Ral asked, changing the topic suddenly and smoothly.

He heard the confusion in Jace's voice as the Guildpact answered, "Well, the vision is a little muddy, and I think I'm getting an echo."

"What about your sense of touch?"

"Um," said Jace.

Ral smiled and moved forward, putting his hand on the weird's waist. "Can you feel that?"

The weird's throat moved convulsively as Jace swallowed. "Yes."

Ral leaned inward, letting his breath play across the weird's throat. "What about that?" he murmured in its ear.

This time Jace's voice shook when he responded, "Y-Yes."

"Then," said Ral, "I think we can call this test a complete success."

There was a moment of silence. "Oh. Yes. The test. Of course."

"So perhaps you'd better help me switch off the system."

"Right. Yes. Of course." The illusion flickered and faded, and the weird slowly relaxed to inanimation once more. This time, the switch moved easily to the off position, and Ral looked suspiciously at Jace, who was blinking dazedly as he removed the last of the wires from his head and started to get up.

Smirking, Ral moved across in front of the chair and pushed him back down. "Wait a minute, Jace," he said. "Don't you think you're being a little hasty?"

"Hasty?" Jace echoed, but he let Ral push him back down.

Ral felt Jace's pulse fluttering wildly as he leaned over and murmured in his ear, "You've crossed off a few of the debts you owe me, Jace, but wouldn't you like some new blackmail material?" He slid a hand down Jace's cheekbone, feeling the soft downy stubble where the mind mage had forgotten to shave, probably because he was too busy helping Ral. "Surely," he continued, his other hand curving lightly along Jace's thigh, "knowing that I have a lover in high places would make for _excellent_ blackmail, don't you think?"

"Um," breathed Jace. "What—what do you want, Ral?"

Ral reached for Jace's belt. "Read my mind, Jace."

There was a moment, and then Jace moaned and reached for Ral's belt as well.

* * *

Ral wouldn't let Jace get his clothes off. At first, Jace had thought he was just being clumsy and slow—he hadn't gone to bed with anyone in at least four years—but it was becoming increasingly obvious that every attempt he made to do anything more than cursorily tug the Izzet mage's shirt up was thwarted by Ral either distracting him or actually knocking his hands over to another location.

"Ral," he gasped, as the other man's lips nipped down his throat to his collar-bone, "is something wrong?"

"That doesn't sound like you moaning my name, so yes."

Jace tried to glare, which didn't work very well, given the position he was in. "Why won't you let me get your clothes off?"

"I don't know what you're talking about."

"Then let me get your shirt off." Jace reached irritably for the hem of Ral's shirt, and the Izzet mage's hands slapped down on top of his. "Well?"

Ral sat back slightly, and the movement of his hips sent sensation jolting and juddering up Jace's spine. Gasping slightly, Jace managed to focus through the overwhelming haze of _I want you, right now, this instant_ , and he brushed gently through the forefront of Ral's mind, following the quick, automatic image the other generated.

"You—have tattoos?" Jace said uncertainly. "I know you do, I've seen the one on your arm."

"Dammit, Beleren, those are my private thoughts!"

"You literally told me to read your mind."

"That was five minutes ago."

Jace glared at him. "I don't care if you have tattoos, I just want to get your damn shirt off," he snapped.

"Well, that's not what your fucking nightmares say, Jace!"

Jace sat back as well. "My nightmares? How would you—oh." The night on Theros, when his and Ral's dreams had merged with such unsettling results. But what did that have to do with—Jace blinked several times as Ral's objections finally became clear. "Those—those were _literally_ symbols of a _demonic pact_. And while I may not have known that, it did mean they had some unpleasant side-effects. Looking directly at them—did things to my stomach."

Ral looked away sideways, awkwardly scratching the back of his neck. "Jace, I just didn't—"

"Ask?" Jace suggested dryly. "You can, you know. And probably should, if you're going to object to me peering into your head. Also, um, I might need a look in anyway. A better look. A more, um, instructive look."

Ral's eyebrows went up. "A more 'instructive' look? What is this, day-school?"

Ears burning, Jace's eyes slid away and landed on the ceiling. It was much easier to contemplate than the mirth he was certain was about to dawn on Ral's face. "I—haven't exactly had—that many lovers," he said. "Actually, just the, well, just the one. The—the anatomy was—well. Different."

"You don't say," Ral drawled slowly.

"I just want to know what you're expecting!" Jace burst out. There was a spider on the ceiling. It was probably laughing at him.

Ral fidgeted uncomfortably in Jace's peripheral vision. "I don't think I was exactly expecting anything," he said finally.

"Just—give me a few pointers," Jace said in frustration, clumsily peering into Ral's head again, letting the Izzet mage feel him rifling around so that he could stop if this got too personal. "Just—wait." He paused, searched again, then looked back at Ral. Groaning, the Izzet mage ran his hands through his hair. "Wait a minute. _No one_? I wouldn't have thought that you were so…" He paused, trying to find a word that wouldn't be insulting.

"Ten thousand volts is kind of a mood-killer!" Ral responded irritably. "That is, in fact, the other reason I didn't want to take everything off." He indicated the gauntlet. "I—don't know if I can keep this controlled even _with_ my adapter." Indeed, lightning was arcing from one of his shoulders to the other. An irritated shudder ran down the lightning mage's frame, and Jace felt Ral's reluctance to admit his lack of confidence in his own ability.

Reaching up a hand, Jace touched Ral's sparking palm, wincing slightly at the prickles of electricity that ran through him. "Breathe with me," he said. "Let's just—take it slow. Okay?"

He felt the lightning surge, felt the hair going up on the back of his neck. Then Ral leaned forward, lacing their fingers together, his breathing shaky. "Slow," he said. "Not a word I'm particularly fond of. But just for you, Jace."

The air crackled with electricity as he carefully removed both shirt and gauntlet. As Jace looked him up and down, Ral's chin went down, his arms going up, body language instinctively closed off. Jace wriggled upright in his seat and then gently pulled his hands aside. "Hey," he said. "I really do want to be here, you know."

"Obviously, Beleren. Obviously you want to be here," Ral snapped. "I'm not stupid. If you didn't want to be here, you wouldn't be here. Don't say stupid things."

"Sorry," Jace grinned in amusement and leaned forward to kiss him, on the lips and then, gently, on the tips of Ral's naked fingers. He heard the lightning mage's soft intake of breath. "There. See? You're not dangerous at all."

"Let's not go that far," grunted Ral, but he was doing a bad job of disguising the relief in his voice.


	14. Chapter 14

**A/N:** In which Ral brags, Jace shows Ral some interesting artifacts, and there are many snuggles.

 **Chapter Fourteen**

Ral whistled as he headed for the coffee pot in the large Nivix break room. His head was buzzing with excitement, images and equations flashing in front of his eyes. He nearly ran over Chamberlain Maree without seeing her, dodged past her, poured himself a cup of coffee, and then turned back as he realized she would probably be interested as well. Besides, Ral needed someone else to enthuse to, and he'd left Jace asleep, still draped across the flux machine.

"Maree!" he exclaimed. "You'll want to hear about last night!"

The Firemind's Chamberlain did not appear to be as excited as he was. There were deep bags under her eyes beneath her ocular lens, and she was slouching inside the crumpled, oversized top she usually wore. "Everyone with a lab on the fourth floor heard about last night already, Zarek," she said coldly.

"Hm? Oh, right, yeah, the sex was good, but that's not what I was talking about."

"Oh?"

Ral grabbed her shoulder. "It works, Maree!"

"What?"

"The flux machine! It works! And not only that—"

"The flux machine? How? What did you _do_?"

Ral slurped his coffee. "It needed another dimension. You wouldn't have thought it would be so simple, but the equations in five dimensions just fall out of the symmetry."

The coffee cup in Maree's hand trembled. "Really," she said.

"Yeah, but that's not the only thing. My subject—"

"There's something you're more excited about than getting the flux machine working?"

"Yes!" Why did she keep interrupting him? "I've never seen anything like it! His mind is—" Ral did a quick swivel. "Listen to me, Maree. His mind must be nearly as powerful as Niv's. Tanit, the patterns I got to see with the flux machine. It was a thing of beauty." He paused for a moment, staring off into the distance, one hand tracing the image in mid-air. "I need a pen."

"Zarek, who on earth is your subject?"

"Oh—just someone," Ral said vaguely, realizing through the haze of coffee and sleepless adrenaline that it might not be a great idea to let news get out that he was fucking the Living Guildpact. "Friend."

Maree made an annoyed hissing noise, but pushed a pen and paper at him. "Honestly, you can't just say things like that and not explain."

"You know a Mizzet curve?" She nodded.

"Okay, start with that. Now imagine that along with a Zarek set. Periodically jumping from one to the other."

"A what?"

He smirked, sketching a few twirling lines on the piece of paper.

"I'd have named it after my friend, but he's—shy. I just need to work out the equations. And this isn't everything. His brain is ridiculous." Ral shook his head gleefully. "The shapes of the mana currents, the patterns, the lightning…" He knew he was devolving into incoherence, but there was too much going on for his mouth to keep up with his brain. He tried to take another swallow of coffee and realized he had already run out. Pausing his scribbling for a moment, he gazed sadly down at the empty mug.

Maree slid another one in front of him. "Go on," she said.

"Well, here we are."

They paused at the end of a hidden passageway in the wall near Jace's office.

"Certainly is quite the hiding spot you've got here," Ral commented idly. Jace had waited until there was no possibility of them being observed to conduct him in here, and had done so only after raising an illusion of invisibility and silence so strong that Ral hadn't even been able to hear his own breathing until they had stepped through and shut the wall behind them.

"And you're the first person I have willingly allowed up here," Jace responded quietly. Ral heard him take a sudden, deep breath, and for a moment he wondered if he should say something, but "thank you for trusting me" sounded stupid, and he wasn't willing to sound stupid for anyone. Not even Jace. He reached for Jace's shoulder to squeeze, but the mind mage was already moving forward into the rooms beyond.

The lights went on. Ral's train of thought took a swan dive off the rails as he saw the beautiful chaos spread out in front of him. "Holy shit," he said, shoving his way past Jace and inspecting the glowing, illusionary pyramid that took up an entire alcove. "What is this?"

"That's a hedron from Zendi—" But Ral had already moved on. There was a map lying on the table, and beside it a parchment covered in scribbled equations, weighted down by a glass paperweight that glowed with some kind of phosphorescent illumination. He could feel the mana emanating gently from it, so it had to be storing energy somehow, but there was no obvious battery. Picking it up, Ral weighed it in his hand and turned it over, but his attention was almost immediately diverted by a soft, familiar humming from across the room.

"That's an Izzet teleportal!" he said accusatorily.

"Yeah, I needed a way to reach a few different places quickly and—"

"Is this why all my goblins kept forgetting their own names, Beleren?" He crossed the room and knelt beside it, following the manalines to where they disappeared into the wall. Not a bad installation, though not as good a job as Ral would have done.

"What? No!"

"Relax, I'm teasing," Ral said distractedly. "What the hell did you do to this thing, though?" Some of the wiring was unfamiliar, leading to a tangled network of faintly glowing runes etched into the walls.

"Uh, not much," Jace responded. "I wanted a way to project illusions through it."

"Interesting," Ral muttered, but before he could be drawn into a proper consideration of just what kind of heresy Jace had wreaked on his precious teleportal, he was distracted by a soft chiming noise. Following it to its source, he found himself staring down at a sprawling, three-dimensional map of what he was almost sure was part of the Tenth District. Someone—presumably Jace—had left a half-eaten chicken leg sitting in the middle of it. Lines of blue-white fire were tracing down the contours of the city, and Ral poked one of them with interest, feeling the mana surge hot around his finger.

"I initially set that up to track the Implicit Maze. I think," Jace said, leaning over his shoulder. "I mean, I had to piece it together again later."

"You have _got_ to tell me how this works," Ral said. The mana clumped up around his finger, swirling in a fat, sluggish eddy that grew slowly brighter.

"Well, if you want—"

"Later," Ral cut him off. "I need to see the things first." That hadn't come out very coherent, but Jace was a mind mage, he'd figure it out. Ral headed over to the table in the middle of the room and traced his fingers eagerly over a thick, curling, ridged horn that lay in the center. He picked it up and turned it over in his hands. "Where's this from?" he asked.

"Uh, a place called Shandalar. Have you ever—"

Ral shook his head. "I don't like leaving Ravnica, remember?" All of these artifacts, though—Jace must have carried things off from dozens of planes in the Multiverse, and Ral suddenly felt that maybe if he were traveling _with_ someone—it would be different. Maybe the angry, homesick yearning would ease a little. He hadn't been happy to be on Theros, but then that had hardly been a fun-filled, careless outing.

There was a basket on one of the chairs, containing nothing but piles of strange shells: thin, iridescent crescents that sparkled in the light and felt smooth and delicate beneath Ral's hands. "Why do you even have these?" he asked.

Jace shrugged. "I like how they look," he said. "I like being able to hold things and remember where I got them. If I don't remember, that's a bad sign."

"You don't say," Ral replied dryly. He had a sudden image of Jace's lonely figure curled up in the middle of all this wonder, hunched over the basket, tracing the shells with his fingers. "How long have you been collecting this stuff?"

"Not long, most of it," said Jace. "A few years, maybe. I had more before that, but I—lost it."

"Hm," grunted Ral, suddenly aware of treading on painful territory and not liking it. He should do something, shouldn't he? They were—he didn't want to use the word 'involved.' Didn't know if Jace would appreciate the word 'involved.' But there was a thin cord of understanding that bound the two of them together, that had sprung into existence during the nightmarish escape from Jace's office nearly a month ago—no, earlier than that. During the rush to discredit Project Lightning Bug. He reached out, took Jace's hand, and squeezed.

His attention wavered as he caught sight of a sketch pinned to a cork board at the other end of the table. Curving horns over a pointed, reptilian snout. "Is that a dragon? Goddamn dragons. I hate dragons."

"Yes," said Jace, but didn't say anything else. It occurred to Ral that he hadn't actually been letting the mind mage finish most of his sentences. Oh, well. They could have a proper conversation later.

"Fucking arrogant assholes," he continued irritably. Having had an interview with the Firemind that morning during which he had to explain the importance of the flux project while skirting around the identity of its primary participant, he was not in a mood to sing Niv's praises. "Why are you sketching dragons anyway?"

"That's from a few years ago," Jace explained. "I was trying to track down a planeswalker called Ugin and—"

" _Please_ tell me we don't have to worry about dragon planeswalkers now," groaned Ral.

Jace paused. "I could lie," he suggested.

Ral let his head drop onto the table. "Why is this my life?" he asked the air. "And what's that?" He got up again to get a better look at a large, spiky thing in the corner.

"Don't touch it!" Jace said urgently just before Ral reached out a hand. "I think it's poisonous."

Leaning over to peer more closely, Ral saw that it wasn't a rock, as he'd first thought, but a dense, prickly piece of plant matter, something like a very large pinecone. "How did you get it back here?" he asked.

"A lot of preparation," Jace responded. "And some luck. Oh—and I didn't get it onto the plane myself. That's one of the things left over from the Infinite Consortium."

"Infinite what?"

"Oh, um," Jace said. There was an awkward pause. "It involves even more dragon planeswalkers. Are you sure you want to know?"

Ral very much did, but he heard the reluctance in Jace's voice. Well, the Guildpact wasn't going anywhere. He could tease out the details later. "Nah, I've had enough dragons for one day," he said.

Another soft chiming noise started up. "Does everything in your office make bell noises, Beleren?"

"Damn, that's Lavinia," Jace said tiredly, by way of answer. "I was expecting to have more than two hours to myself, but apparently the Living Guildpact is needed once again." Making a disgruntled noise, he tugged at his cloak and turned to Ral. "You can stay here if you want. Just try not to take anything apart."

Ral sighed heavily. "I suppose I can try, just for you."

"I do appreciate it," Jace said, and then he leaned across the table and kissed Ral on the cheek.

The soft brush of his lips across Ral's cheekbone sent a sudden, strange shock of warmth through him. Before he could fully process what his insides were doing, Jace was already leaving, swirling his cloak around him dramatically as he hurried out the door. Ral stared after him in silence for a long moment before turning back to the eclectic collection spread across the room.

Jace trailed exhaustedly back to his room, mumbling half-formed curses beneath his breath. Not only had Lavinia had about five hundred different documents for him to read and sign, she had been unable to extricate him from an unexpected meeting with the Simic for something along the lines of five hours. Drooping with weariness, Jace halted in front of the door of his apartment and sighed.

It took more energy than it should have for him to raise a hand and call the simple spell that opened the door, and he trudged in, hung his cloak over the back of one of the chairs, and headed directly for the bedroom. It was definitely time to sleep for a century, if possible.

The bed was occupied. Jace sighed. Of course Ral hadn't left, like any sensible person, when Jace was gone until well past midnight. Of course he'd found the bed, and of course he'd fallen asleep in it. If he wasn't actively working on a project, presumably he did actually sleep, after all, though for the past few weeks, Jace hadn't seen him make any concession to weariness other than downing five cups of coffee at a time. Which, come to think of it, might explain how Ral had ended up collapsing in his bed.

Well, it looked like tonight was going to be a floor night. There was a nice rug in the main room, Jace thought vaguely, but he refused to sleep without a pillow, and Ral had both of them tucked securely beneath his head. Sighing again, Jace leaned over to lever one of them out from under Ral's head—and Ral's hand came up clumsily and tugged at his sleeve.

"Sorry," Jace apologized. "I didn't mean to wake you." There was no response, other than a sleepy, incoherent mumble. The hand tugged more insistently. "You can, um, let go of my sleeve," said Jace, awkwardly.

The mumble this time sounded an awful lot like, "stupid Guildpact," and Ral sat up, eyes still shut, took both of Jace's arms and tugged him forward. He overbalanced and fell onto the bed, and Ral writhed around in a way that Jace finally realized was an attempt to pull him into a clumsy embrace.

There wasn't a lot of room in the bed, but it was certainly better than the floor. And Jace was suddenly, forcibly reminded that he hadn't shared a bed with anyone—unless you counted sharing a pallet in Theros when he was out of his mind with manafever—since he had been involved with Liliana. And he had always been the one to curl up around her, not the other way around. Ral wriggled at his back, and one long arm dropped possessively across Jace's chest. A sudden, short sob caught at the back of Jace's throat, and he had to stifle the noise into the pillow.

The arm around Jace tightened slightly, and the tight knot in his throat rose. Silent tears welled up in his eyes, and shivers ran through his body. He didn't know what was happening to him, but as he curled in on himself, Ral followed, enveloping him. Safety, Jace thought sleepily, through the strange haze of tears and tiredness. It was a new feeling, being safe.

Ral was warm, and in a bed. He wasn't used to being in a bed. If he didn't fall asleep at his desk, he usually curled up in a chair at his lab. It wasn't so much that he didn't like the bed in his small apartment as that he tended to fall asleep without meaning to. Furthermore, this did not smell like his bed. The smell of Ral's bed—when he noticed it at all—was usually either the sharp, plain scent of the Eighth District's soap, or, more commonly, the tang of ozone he had trailed home from the lab. The bed he was in smelled softer, somehow. It wasn't a floral smell, though there was a vague whiff of flowers—just something else he couldn't quite identify.

Ral blinked his eyes open slowly and stared stupidly at the blue mound in front of him, which rose and fell softly with the sound of gentle snoring. His arm was trapped underneath something, and he rolled backward, trying to free it, but the blue mound came with him, and he found himself on his back beneath a sleeping mind mage, who was now beginning to stir, but very slowly. Well. This was a new experience.

His first instinct was to pull away, but Jace squirming sleepily toward him was—well, Ral wasn't quite sure what, except that he didn't want to pull away. The mind mage yawned and stretched, then blinked his eyes open slowly and smiled. "Good morning," he said.

"Uh," said Ral. "Morning? Good morning, even."

"Did you sleep okay? I know there's not a lot of room in here."

Ral considered this. "Yes?" he hazarded. He had no memory of falling asleep, though thinking back, he did have a vague memory of someone disturbing said sleep in the middle of the night.

"Good," yawned Jace. "I really hope I don't have too much to do today, and I haven't heard Lavinia calling for me, so either it's early, or some of my meetings got cancelled."

"That's…good." It was good, right? That meant that Jace was happy to have Ral here? Was _Ral_ happy to be here? Jace rolled forward slightly, slid a hand up to Ral's hair, and kissed him gently on the lips. Okay. Yes. Definitely good. Happy. Whatever.

Jace sighed into his mouth, and Ral's arm instinctively tightened around the mind mage's back. Waking up to Jace was good. This was good. His other hand was on Jace's face, ruffling through Jace's hair, and the mind mage was wriggling against him again. Ral felt a shiver run down his spine, and he buried his face in Jace's hair, nuzzling his way down Jace's neck.

Jace made a soft, lazy humming noise that turned a little more breathy after a moment. "R-Ral," he murmured, and Ral grinned and slid a hand up beneath Jace's shirt and across his side.

"That's the first time you've said my name like that, Jace. Do you want something?"

"I r-really should be getting up," Jace temporized, but he made no move to pull away.

"If you really want to, I won't stop you," Ral smirked, leaning backward. Jace made a soft noise of disappointment as Ral's hands left his side, and then followed him. Ral found himself on his back with Jace leaning over him, biting his lip. "Well, Guildpact," he murmured, reaching up to brush Jace's hair out of his eyes, "what now?"

Twenty minutes later, Jace collapsed beside him. Laying a hand on his side, Ral could feel that the Guildpact was still trembling. "So you liked that?" he asked in amusement.

Jace's sweaty face turned to the side. "Didn't you?" he asked, sounding faintly defensive.

"Mmmm," Ral acquiesced, leaning over to steal a kiss from Jace's salty lips.

From the other room, a bell chimed. Jace groaned. "That would be Lavinia," he said regretfully.

"Maybe she'll keep you there long enough for me to regain my stamina," Ral grinned. "Say twenty minutes or so."

Jace gave him a mock glare. "I will almost certainly be gone for the entire day," he said.

"Well, that's more time than I'd need."

"Well, that's too bad."

"I'm sorry it takes you so long, Jace."

Jace sputtered angrily. "That is not—" pursing his lips, he cut himself off. "Joking aside," he said. "Would you, um, like to come to dinner with me again tonight? Now that your current project is at a lull."

"I'd like to come anywhere with you tonight," Ral said, smiling innocently.

Jace narrowed his eyes. "So dinner."

"All right."

Ral watched as Jace hastily pulled on his clothes, amused at the Guildpact's clumsy motions and attempts to ignore his clearly trembling legs. The little noises Jace kept making whenever the cloth shifted against his skin were also immensely entertaining. Slipping his cloak on last, Jace paused in the doorway to smile back at Ral. "I'll see you this evening," he said. "Make yourself at home."

Ral nodded, lying back in the bed as Jace hurried out in a swirl of blue cloth. He yawned and stretched, and then settled back against the pillows. Nothing pressing to do today—not till Jace was free anyway. Heh. Sleepily, he snuggled down in the bed. The soft smell of Jace surrounding him, he felt himself drifting off to sleep again.


	15. Chapter 15

**A/N:** In which Jace and Ral go on a date, Jace has a panic attack, and everyone has Feelings.

 **Chapter Fifteen**

Jace found himself pacing back and forth outside his apartment. He didn't know if Ral was still in there, or if the Izzet mage had headed off to work on another project or do whatever else it was he did with his time. Report to the dragon. Fill out paperwork requests for equipment. That sort of thing.

 _You need to go in,_ Jace told himself firmly. His brain was throwing up random things Ral could be doing to avoid thinking about the actual subject at hand, which was that, for the second time in a month, he had a date with Ral Zarek.

Why should that make him nervous? Jace's palms were slippery with sweat, and he still hadn't convinced himself he wanted to go back into his apartment. For Krokt's sake, he'd been spending practically every free moment he _had_ with Ral for the past few weeks, and this morning and the night before that, they had—a shiver that was half nerves, half lust passed down his spine. The point was that he knew that the two of them got along well. He enjoyed spending time with Ral.

Maybe that was the problem, Jace thought, tugging nervously at the hem of his cloak. He enjoyed it a little too much. It wasn't that the enjoyment was a bad thing, it was that whenever he enjoyed spending time with someone this much, bad things seemed to happen. He shook his head. He was overthinking this.

Taking one last, deep breath, he carefully completed the spell required to gain access to his apartment, and pushed the door open. Stepping inside, he could still smell a vague hint of burning, but there was a definite sense of emptiness pervading the apartment. Jace sighed, half with relief, half with disappointment, and headed toward the other side of his apartment.

He was about to take his cloak off when he caught sight of the teleportal—or what was left of it. It had been pulled halfway out of the wall, the tangle of wires entirely rearranged. "Oh goddammit," Jace said tiredly, heading over to it. Inspecting it carefully, he was slightly relieved to see that the wiring he had installed himself was intact, so that he should still be able to illuse through it and make certain he wasn't going to step into a volcano or something if he stepped through. Unlikely, though. The teleportal was, after all, Izzet technology. He should have known better than to leave it alone with an Izzet mage.

Sighing in irritation, Jace peered through the teleportal, gave the room a quick visual sweep, and then stepped through. "You know," he said, "this was installed to allow me to cover significantly more ground than just the Tenth District."

"Oh, hi," Ral said, looking up from a sort of drift of papers across his desk. "Wow, is it that late already? Sorry, meant to come back and recalibrate the teleportal, but I guess I got distracted. Fucking dragon."

"What happened?" Jace asked, leaning against the wall.

"The Firemind decided to pop his head in. Wanted to know how the flux project was going. I had to explain while attempting not to mention your identity."

"I do appreciate that."

"Yeah, well, it's not exactly altruistic. I don't need the lizard leaning on me to use my connections with you." There was an unspoken 'whatever those are' hanging in the air, and Jace was tempted to try and respond to it, but the nerves cut him off again, sending his stomach up into his throat. He sighed in irritation. Ral continued speaking. "And then Maree showed up and chewed me out for telling Niv about _her_ project. Wanted to know how he found out. And I just—how does that fat salamander find anything out?" Ral ended with a growl and put his head down on the desk with a loud thud.

This was something Jace could handle. A mix of feelings rose in his chest, but he decided to ignore them in favor of action, for the time being at least. Crossing the room, he put his hands on Ral's shoulders. "You sound like someone who could use a distraction," he said. "How about that date?" Ral made a petulant noise, and Jace nuzzled into the back of his neck and began to massage his shoulders. "I imagine we could do something else a little later as well," he murmured into Ral's ear. The shoulders tightened beneath his hands, and Ral made an entirely different kind of noise.

Leaning back in the chair, the Izzet mage caught Jace's gaze. "We could skip the date," he said huskily.

Jace, suddenly catapulted back to the exciting morning, was tempted. But he also knew he would be annoyed at himself later if he let this opportunity slip by. "There's a plane I really think you'd like," he said.

Ral gave him a suspicious look. "You know I don't like leaving Ravnica," he said. "Besides, the last time we left, we were stranded for a week."

"And, fortunately, no one is trying to kill me this time," Jace pointed out.

Ral sighed heavily. " _Must_ we, Guildpact?"

"Not if you don't want to," Jace said awkwardly, the knot in his stomach suddenly curling into tightness again. His eyes slid away from Ral's, and the Izzet mage sighed again, more theatrically this time.

"Oh, all right," he said. "Just for you, Jace."

"Do you think you can follow me?"

Ral cocked an eyebrow at him. "Yeah, probably. It's not as if I haven't done it before."

"You probably remember that better than I do," Jace pointed out. "In any case, this plane isn't—far." An odd thing to say, for a journey that had no length, but it was a simple route, one that Jace had taken several times, and always from Ravnica.

Ral gave him an intrigued look. "You know, we really need to compare notes," he said. "I don't usually describe the Eternities in terms of distance in my head, but when you say that, it makes sense."

"I thought you didn't like planeswalking," Jace teased, holding out his hand.

"I like knowing things, though," Ral replied, not quite rising to the bait. His eyes had turned very bright, and he took Jace's hand quickly and tightly.

"I've often wondered if it was possible to come up with any real theories about the Blind Eternities," Jace mused, as he began to slowly prepare himself for the planeswalk.

"It would certainly help to have some kind of point of reference," Ral said, one hand tapping at his bottom lip. "I mean, two points of data is pretty worthless, but on the other hand two points of view does establish a baseline, so you could at least trust your own observations." He stretched across the desk, picking up a piece of paper. "You'd need to do something completely new with the mana equations, of course, the boundary conditions simply wouldn't hold, and I think you'd need integrate Marav's sum out to infinity…"

The ground seemed to fall away as the Eternities enveloped them both, Jace not without the sudden sensation of the bottom dropping out of his stomach. He shouldn't have been able to planeswalk this easily, but somehow the walls of the world had simply melted away.

Ups and downs pulled at him from every direction, the flare of the mana-currents bright and cold against him. In one hand, he held raw aether; in the other, he held the storm, crackling and beating against his palm. He tried to turn his head, but the Eternities refused to cooperate, as they often did, and he was forced to simply hold tight and will himself toward his destination. The storm writhed and surged, crackling up his fingers and twining through his wrist, arm, and chest, caressing the heartbeat in his ears.

His head tilted back; amid the raw, boiling chaos of the Eternities, the storm was its own chaos, an asynchronous repeated pattern that had no beginning and no end. He let it swarm and sing inside his ears, even as his feet traced out the dizzy dance that would take them safely through the spinning unreality and back—

They dropped again, and Jace wondered why he always managed to miss the ground, in the instant before he landed with a squelch in knee-deep mud. He staggered backwards, trying to regain his balance, and an arm slid underneath his back and caught him. Ral set him back on his feet and then gave him a little pat on his lower back. Jace wasn't sure if it had been intentional or just an instinctual thing, but it gave him an odd sense of being cared for. It was—nice.

"Thanks," he said awkwardly.

"So," said Ral, ignoring the thanks in favor of looking around. "Nice swamp you've brought me to."

"Oh, goddammit," Jace said tiredly. Of all the places on this plane to have landed on, he had to hit a swamp. What a fantastic way to start off their date. "Well, I doubt it's very large," he said, with forced cheerfulness, glancing up at the sky. The sun was beating down relentlessly, and Jace's already-sinking heart sank even further. He could count on one hand the number of days he had been here that the sky _hadn't_ been covered with dark purple clouds.

"Sooo," Ral said again. "Why exactly did you want me to see a swamp, Jace?"

"Just. Let's just leave the swamp, okay?"

"Well, we could go back to Ravnica—"

Jace glared at him, took a deep breath to quiet the little screaming voice in his head, and said, "Give it a few minutes, okay?"

They started walking. The air was heavy with moisture, to the point that it was almost difficult for Jace to breathe, something else he hadn't experienced on this plane before, though he supposed it made sense for the humidity levels to be high in a place where thunderstorms were nigh-constant. After less than thirty seconds, small swarms of biting insects descended. Jace found himself cursing under his breath and trying to come up with some kind of spell that would run them off, but nothing immediately came to mind. Somehow, he suspected his usual summons wouldn't be very good at dealing with mosquitos.

Ral glanced over at him, then reached for his belt. "Good thing I didn't take this off," he said, pulling off something that looked like a lantern, but had wires running across it in every conceivable location.

"What is that?" Jace asked.

Lightning ran like water along the gauntlet into the object Ral was holding, and something in the center ignited, burning with a clear, white flame. The outside crackled with electricity. The small insects, abandoning their pursuit of the two planeswalkers, dove toward the light, and a moment later there were a number of small, pathetic zapping noises. Ral smirked. "Traipsing through one swamp getting eaten alive was enough for me," he said.

"What?" Jace asked.

"Oh, right, you were unconscious, weren't you? Let me explain to you something about the trouble I had to go through to find you on the Plane of Cats and Gods."

Having no good response to that, Jace continued slogging, wiping the sweat from his forehead. He tried desperately to come up with some kind of topic of conversation, but his mind was frustratingly blank, as blank as the infuriatingly clear sky above them. After another few minutes, Ral spoke again. "Not to be picky or anything, but did you have anything planned for this date other than slogging through a swamp in the middle of nowhere? You may not have realized this, but I am not actually much of an outdoors person."

"Neither am I," Jace said irritably. "This swamp wasn't here last time."

"It appeared just to spite you?"

"Yes!" Jace ran his hand through his hair, then sighed. "No. Obviously not. But this is definitely the worst landing I've ever had here. Usually I'm near one of their villages." He paused. "I'm sorry. I'm really—I thought this would be nice."

"Why _this_ plane, anyway?" Ral asked, apparently ignoring the apology.

Jace looked up at the sky, willing clouds to appear, but they steadfastly refused to do so. He sighed, thankful that at least he had put a mud-repellant spell on his cloak after the numerous times it had been made nearly unsalvageable. Then he looked around. The cloak might be salvageable, but the date was not. He bowed his head in defeat. "It's usually not sunny," he said. "In fact, I've only seen it not thundering once before, and I know what you're like about storms, so…" he trailed off.

To his surprise, Ral chuckled. "That was—thoughtful," he said.

"Thoughtful?" Jace echoed in some surprise.

Fiddling with his belt, Ral shrugged. "Yeah. Maybe—we could come back some time? Just because we were unlucky once doesn't mean we'll be unlucky again."

"I am so sorry," Jace blurted. "This whole thing is a disaster, I should just have let you stay on Ravnica, and—"

"Oh, shut up," said Ral, but his voice was kind. "Don't make a fuss, Jace. I needed to test the bug zapper anyway."

Jace glanced down at himself, at the stains of mud on his trousers, and his water-filled boots, and had to laugh. "I'm a mess."

Ral's hand slipped beneath his chin, cupping his face and turning it upward. "Yeah, you are," he agreed. "So, why don't we go back to Ravnica, get some shitty street food, and fuck our brains out?" His voice was light, but his hand was trembling slightly, and Jace realized suddenly that Ral was nervous as well.

"Yeah," he agreed. "And discuss theories of mana conduction in the Blind Eternities."

"Sounds like a plan. Well, come on then."

It took longer this time for Jace to prepare and reach for the Eternities, but it wasn't difficult. The journey back was even less eventful than the one the other way had been, and this time they actually landed on the ground, not far from Nivix. The sun was low in the sky by now—odd how time sometimes ran differently between planes—and the streets were changing from day business to evening, lights winking on all over the city. The shouts of the vendors now proclaimed goods of a slightly different nature, and the hot, greasy smell of sizzling food pervaded the air around them.

"So what are you in the mood for?" Ral asked. "Shitty _knedliki_ , shitty _topinki_ , or shitty _polevka_?"

"Yes," Jace said absentmindedly, then paused. "Oh. Sorry. Let's do _knedliki_ , it's probably the easiest."

They waited in line at the nearest vendor, and Jace found himself staring dreamily at the line of lights along the rooftops in the distance. The smell of fried _knedliki_ wafted to his nostrils, as well as the smell of sweat from the close-packed bodies around him. The murmur of Ravnican life surrounded him, and he felt connected to it—not in a bullshit Selesnyan way, just a sudden sense of home and rightness. And yet, for once, the planeswalk hadn't felt so oppressive. Instead of noticing the wrongness of the other world, he noticed the rightness of his own. It was—

Jace shook his head in consternation. Those weren't his thoughts. He looked over at Ral, who was also staring vaguely into the distance. He hadn't meant to intrude and wasn't certain how it had happened. Maybe the Blind Eternities had broken down his mental barriers, or maybe he'd just been spending too much time with Ral in the past few days. Either way, he needed to be more careful—he couldn't just go waltzing into Ral's head whenever his concentration faltered.

Ral glanced over questioningly, and Jace felt heat rising to his face, shook his head slightly, and looked away. Before he could embarrass himself further, they reached the front of the line, handed over a few zinos—thank god Jace actually had money on him this time—and came away with a basket full of the hot, fried dumplings, half of them filled with meat, half with thick, sweet paste.

As they crossed the street towards Nivix, there was a strange, heavy tension in the air, and as they paused for a moment to look at one another, brilliant lightning sparked across the sky, answered almost immediately by an angry rumble of thunder. Ral's eyes reflected the stormy sky, and Jace didn't know whether to step forward or backward. In the end, he stood dithering, and it was Ral who closed the gap between them, stooping slightly until they were nearly nose to nose. "Looks like we get that thunderstorm after all," he said with a sly grin, and Jace swallowed, a shiver running down his spine. "C'mon, let's go eat dinner and watch the show."

The fried dumplings were hot and greasy and delicious, and there was something very exciting about sprawling on the floor of Ral's lab with all the lights out, staring out at the tumultuous sky. Jace found himself sighing in lazy delight. All right, so the date hadn't gone exactly as he'd planned—but he'd enjoyed himself, and one sidelong glance at the rapt lightning mage beside him told him that Ral had as well.

As lightning spidered across the sky again, Jace popped the last of the _knedliki_ into his mouth and scooted across the floor towards Ral. Tentatively, he laid his hand over the other man's. There was a pause, and then Ral turned towards him, lightning reflected in his eyes again. Jace had time for a soft intake of breath, and then Ral was kissing him hard, one forceful hand on Jace's back holding him close.

If the previous night had been tentative, and this morning heedless, this was—intense. Jace felt himself slowly but steadily tipping over, until he was on his back on the floor with Ral pressing down against him. The breath rose choked and fast in Jace's throat at the taste of ozone on his lips, and again that strange feeling was rising in his throat. Tears blurred his eyes, and he frantically tried to swipe them away, terrified that Ral would get the wrong idea.

His genius idea might have worked, if he hadn't managed to bash Ral in the side of the head with his arm. "Ow," Ral said, sitting up. "What the fuck, Jace?"

That damned tightness in his throat, welling up the way it had the night before. Out of fucking nowhere. Desperately, Jace tried to reach into his own head and turn off the feeling, but he couldn't get the focus for it.

"Mother of—" Ral cut off whatever he had been about to say. "What did I do?"

If he squinted his eyes shut very tightly, the tears stayed inside. "Nothing," Jace managed to get out through gritted teeth. "You didn't do anything. Just give me a minute."

There was a chilly silence. "Yeah, okay, sorry," Ral said in a flat voice. "I'll just go over—"

Eyes still tight shut, Jace reached up and grabbed his arm. "No. Just—" he sat up and found both hands balled into Ral's shirt front, which was embarrassing, but not embarrassing enough for him to let go. " _—give me a minute_."

There was another pause, a more considering one this time. Gingerly, Ral put a hand on Jace's shoulder. "Yeah, okay," he said again, animation returning to his voice. They sat in silence for a few minutes, staring out at the thunderous sky. The tightness in Jace's chest eased, his breathing deepened.

"All right, I've had a minute," he said, after a further pause to make sure that the strange feeling was entirely gone. "Now what were we doing?"

Ral gave him a strange look, but leaned forward with a leer. "I think," he breathed in Jace's face, "there was about to be a good ending to a good date."

This time when Ral pinned him to the floor, the only change in Jace's breathing was to allow the moan to escape his throat.

* * *

Jace woke shivering, the light touch of cloth around him not enough to cut away the chill. He sat up in confusion and had to struggle his way out of the constricting folds of his cloak. Managing that, he realized that he was naked, and the events of the previous evening came back in a rush. Well. That had been—enjoyable. He was going to have bruises soon, though. Maybe the floor hadn't been such a fantastic idea.

Drawing his cloak around him more tightly, Jace went searching for his lover and his clothes. The clothes were easy—they were still lying scattered around the base of the chair where Ral had dropped them. The lover was only slightly more difficult, primarily because his lamp appeared to have burnt out. Ral was slumped over the desk, having apparently fallen asleep while working on another experiment. Jace found himself smiling stupidly as he stared at Ral's face, illuminated by the glow of the instruments.

He hadn't expected this, whatever it was. Every twist and turn of the past few weeks had pushed them in this direction, but each one had been unexpected in its own unique way. It had been quite the ride, Jace thought, but well worth it. He stooped over Ral, brushing his dark hair back from his forehead, and pressed a kiss to his temple. The lightning mage mumbled in his sleep and shivered slightly. Jace shook his head. Of course Ral hadn't even bothered to put on a shirt. That might have taken three seconds away from whatever idea had dragged him back to the lab table in the first place.

Unfastening his cloak from around his shoulders, Jace carefully tucked it around Ral instead. He was thirsty and suspected he would need a glass of water before falling asleep again, which was mildly irritating, since it meant wandering around Nivix in the middle of the night. Well, never mind, he thought, as he pulled on his shirt and trousers. A simple illusion should be sufficient to keep his identity concealed if he happened to run into anyone.

Yawning, he headed out the door of Ral's lab into the bright corridor beyond and stood blinking for a moment at the sudden increase in light. As he turned away from the door, he nearly bumped into someone who had been standing near it. The Izzet scientist was short, and for a moment he thought she was a goblin, but as she looked up at him, his brain rearranged her features correctly, and he realized he was looking at a small human woman wearing an extendable lens of some kind over one eye.

"Oh," said Jace. "Um."

"Evening," the woman said. "Are you Zarek's new—uh—" Pause.

Jace felt his cheeks growing warm. "Yeah," he said hesitantly, after a moment. "I am Zarek's new 'uh'." Good thing he'd put up that illusion before leaving Ral's lab.

"He's said a lot about you."

"Has he?" Jace was suddenly concerned.

"You're guildless, right?" Her eyes were bright and intense. "You know, if you're really as good with the flux machine as he says, there could be a place in the League for you."

Jace was beginning to feel slightly trapped, but he tried to ignore it. "I'm, um, flattered," he said finally. "I'd rather not make a decision like that in the middle of the night, though. I just came out to get a glass of water."

"Follow me, I'll take you to a drinking fountain." She beckoned with one hand and took off determinedly down the hallway. Jace followed, slightly reluctant, but hoping that once he got the drink, she'd let him head back into Ral's lab. It had to be something like two in the morning. Why was anyone even up?

Jace shook his head. _He_ was often up at two in the morning—why would he expect members of the notoriously unstable Izzet to have a reasonable bedtime?

"Here," the woman at his side said, stopping suddenly. She made a vaguely theatrical gesture to the side, and Jace's gaze automatically followed. There was a moment of confusion as he registered the empty darkness at the side of the passage—a doorway, not a drinking fountain—and then something hot and bright and electric made contact with his side. A brief buzzing pain swept through his body, and everything went black.

* * *

Maree stared down at Zarek's new boyfriend, whose illusions had vanished with his consciousness, taking in the thin, blue tattoos, the shirt and trousers decorated with curving white, eldritch runes. "Oh fuck," she said.


	16. Chapter 16

**A/N:** In which Ral Zarek planeswalks, forgets his gauntlet, and drips lightning everywhere, and Jace Beleren wakes up an unfamiliar location.

 **Chapter Sixteen**

Ral woke groggily, the wood of his desk pressing painfully into his cheek. After a moment of rubbing his eyes, he looked around for Jace, but there was no sign of him. The room was empty.

A headache started gnawing at Ral's temples. Brushing it aside, he leaned forward across the desk, and saw that a piece of paper had been tucked beneath one of the manalines, the large, neat handwriting recognizable to him only because he had seen it used to outline glowing equations in midair.

 _Dear Guildmage Zarek_ , he read, and the headache intensified.

 _I apologize for leaving you like this, but I thought it better not to remain. Although our time in the past few weeks has been enjoyable, you will understand when I say that the social strata that we occupy are somewhat removed from one another. However, I do hope to see you in the future._

 _J. Beleren_

Every piece of equipment in Ral's lab suffered a sudden, catastrophic overload as the headache blossomed into a crackling arc of lightning that leapt uncontrollably from place to place. For a moment, there was nothing around him but the searing crimson mana, and then for the second time in as many days, Ral felt the storm inside him ignite and fling him away from Ravnica entirely.

He didn't really know where he was going, but maybe it wasn't a huge surprise when he landed, looked around, and recognized the cluster of tents spread across the wide field. Where else would he even have gone? Lightning crackling along his back and arm, Ral began to pick his way down the hillside toward the leonin encampment. Maybe some gods or their followers would try something with him. That sounded like a fun time.

The soreness in his legs, which had been almost pleasant until he'd read the note, joined a sudden soreness in his throat and eyes, and he had to roughly push at them with his hand. What the fuck was wrong with him? So Beleren had come to his senses. Well, was he really surprised? After all, who would want to be associated with a mage from the slums of Ravnica? He should have known after the Guildpact's panic attack the night before that it wasn't going to last.

The smell of bacon hit his nostrils as he got closer to the camp. Food sounded nice right about now. Anything he could dig his teeth into, rip and tear. There was a small campfire built in the center of the circle of tents pitched nearest to the outside of the camp, and Iskra was once again frying bacon in a large pan. She looked up as he neared, her ears perking in what he surmised was surprise.

"Good morning, Zarek," she chirped. "Come and have some breakfast."

"Morning," he mumbled automatically, stumping down the bottom of the hill and throwing himself onto the large log by the fire that was presumably intended for seating.

Iskra bustled around the fire, turning the bacon over with a flat metal implement, and finally taking it off and tipping some of it onto a nearby plate, which she held out to him. "Zarek?" she said, almost timid. "Did something happen to your companion?"

The bolt of lightning jerked from Ral's outstretched hand without his conscious consent, arcing toward Iskra, whose fur went up as she hastily dropped the plate and caught the electricity with both hands. She staggered as it ran through her, shaking her fur in distaste as it bled from her into the ground. Ral stared in consternation, glanced down, and realized he wasn't wearing his gauntlet. Damn. "Sorry," he managed. "You okay?"

Iskra wrinkled her nose and sneezed sparks. "Ye-es," she answered uncertainly. "The bacon's not, though." The plate had hit a rock when it fell to the ground, and it had shattered, spilling grease and bacon across the ground.

"Sorry," Ral managed, wrapping his arms around himself. "I should go." What had he been thinking, leaving his lab without his gauntlet? If he had been thinking at all. He got up rapidly. "You sure you're all right?"

Iskra caught his arm as he passed, and he flinched back in concern. "Zarek," she said. "What's wrong? Is he hurt again?"

Ral shook his head, a quick, pained negation. "He's fine," he said bitterly. "Just…"

"Then why are you wearing his cloak?"

"I—" Stupidly, Ral stared down at himself. There was gooseflesh on his bare arms from the cold morning air. He wasn't wearing a shirt. Instead, Jace's blue cloak was draped over his shoulders, the front fastener tangled in the cloth so that it hadn't fallen. "I need to sit down," he finished, which hadn't been what he'd intended to say.

"I'll make more bacon," Iskra said, which was such an ordinary sort of thing to say that Ral had to chuckle weakly. "What happened, anyway?" she asked, as she began to clean up the broken plate. Ral sat down, not feeling quite guilty enough to offer to help.

He had to think for a minute before answering. "We fell asleep together last night—" Pause. She was a kitten. What did that mean? Ral had a vague notion that you weren't supposed to talk about sex in front of small children, but he had an even vaguer notion of what constituted "small".

Iskra's tail twitched in what was probably amusement. "Yeah," she agreed. "Then what?"

"I woke up, and he was gone," Ral said absently. He rubbed the cloth of Jace's cloak between his fingers. "Left a note. Not a very nice one."

"Was he angry?"

"Didn't think I was that bad in bed," Ral snorted, a little sarcasm returning to his voice. "Uh. Anyway. He said he didn't want to—" The lightning crackled across him again, and again he wished for his gauntlet. "But—" The thought of Jace writing that stilted letter and then cautiously tucking one of his most precious possessions around Ral's shoulders before stealing away didn't fit. It didn't make any sense.

Iskra finished collecting the shards of the plate and rose, nose wrinkling. She grinned and flicked a spark at him. "My eldest brother says bedding someone after you've had an argument is really fun," she offered.

Ral had to pause for a moment as his mind threw up the image of an apologetic and very naked Jace. "Ah," he said.

As Iskra hurried back and forth, first fetching more bacon, and then starting to fry it again, his mind kept returning to the conundrum of the previous night. He didn't remember falling asleep. If he tried very hard, he thought he could conjure up a feeling of light hands on his shoulders, but it might just be wishful thinking. But—Jace wouldn't leave the cloak. Well, he might, but he wouldn't have written a rejection letter and then…noticed that Ral was cold, tucked his cloak around him, and left? That wasn't how normal people acted, surely? Either way, it didn't seem to fit what he knew of Jace. Which led to two possible conclusions: either Jace hadn't tucked the cloak around him (absurd; who else would have any desire to do so?) or Jace hadn't written that letter after all. And if Jace had not been the one to write the letter, then someone else had snuck into Ral's darkened lab and left a note in Jace's handwriting, intended to be read exactly as Ral had read it. With the result that he would presumably lock himself in his lab for a week or two—no, they might not know him—but at the least, they would not expect him to seek out Jace.

"Don't shock me this time." Iskra shoved a new plate of bacon at him and hopped onto the log to sit next to him.

Somebody didn't want Ral poking his nose in and checking on the Living Guildpact. There was unlikely to be a _benign_ reason behind that.

"I'm learning to control the sparks a little bit!" Iskra said excitedly, interrupting Ral's train of thought. "I mean, no one is too happy about all the lightning flying around, but they got tired of trying to stop me, I think."

That got a grin out of Ral. "Good for you, kid. Didn't get in trouble for taking me to Jace?"

Iskra shrugged. "Oh, I got in a lot of trouble. I was washing pots and pans for a week. Did you know that you can store lightning in water? It's really funny to dump spark-filled water onto someone who's annoying you."

This received a chuckle. Ral's insides were going warm and cold at the same time, his mind trying to process both his camaraderie with Iskra and his creeping concern for Jace. "Yeah, my teachers weren't happy when I figured that out." He paused, moving to a less painful memory. "Used to leave buckets of water over the door for my friends to walk into when we were studying for admission into the League, though."

"I don't think a tent would support a bucket very well," Iskra said meditatively. "But does it work with any liquid? My brothers keep trying to steal my soup."

"Test it and find out," said Ral. "What's the worst that could happen?"

"Hm," Iskra said meditatively, then giggled. "I could see the future in a bowl of soup!" she said cheerfully. "Oh! What is the blue and red symbol that looks like a bat with spikes? Do you know?"

Ral choked on his bacon. "Uh," he said. "Don't worry about it, kid." A bat with spikes. Well, that was a new one. Somehow, he thought the committee of members who had squabbled over the new sigil for five weeks several years ago would be less than pleased to hear it described that way.

"But I want to know," Iskra said plaintively.

Trying to think of a way to answer her without either lying or discussing Ravnica in detail was giving Ral a headache. Finally, he compromised with, "That's something you, uh, have to find out for yourself."

Iskra sighed, tail lashing. "How annoying," she said.

"I should go," Ral said abruptly. "I—need to make sure that Jace _isn't_ in trouble."

"Well, at least you got something to eat," Iskra said prosaically. "You should come back and have breakfast again. Only maybe don't make me drop the plate next time. We don't have that many to spare."

Ral looked down at his plate. Somehow, despite not really tasting it, he had managed to eat all the bacon he'd been given. "Thanks," he said. "Uh. Thanks. I—yeah. Sure. I'll come back when I can." He heard himself saying the words and wondered where they'd come from. If he wasn't careful, he'd start enjoying spending time off-plane. He shook his head. There were more immediate things to worry about.

* * *

The office of the Living Guildpact was heavily guarded by a number of Azorius arresters. Ral briefly considered stopping when they asked him to, but decided that it was too much hassle. In the end, he strode into Lavinia's office trailing three protesting armed guards, sweating slightly from the number of times he had countered a detention sphere.

Lavinia looked up in what appeared to be mild confusion and annoyance. "Guildmage Zarek—" she began formally.

"Is Jace here?" Ral demanded.

The arrester's eyebrows went up. "Did you two have a quarrel already?" she asked.

Ral felt heat on his face, lightning crackling in the vicinity of his arm, and he wished he had bothered to stop at Nivix for his gauntlet. He leaned forward across the desk. "No, we did not have a quarrel," he said angrily. "Is he here?"

Lavinia's impassive face gave away no emotion, but she waved a hand to the three guards to stand down. "Ral," she sighed. "I received your note not three hours ago. How did you manage to lose him in that time?"

Ral blinked. "My what?" he repeated in confusion.

There were several neat stacks of paper on the desk. Lavinia reached unerringly across to one of them, and plucked a sheet that was about third from the top. "Your note," she said, passing it to him.

 _Dear Lavinia,_ Ral read, in a passable imitation of his own handwriting. _Jace and I were hoping to have a little more time together. Can you possibly make his excuses for us for a few days?_ The signature though—that wasn't an imitation. Ral stared. He knew he had not signed this, but Lavinia could be forgiven for having been fooled.

"I didn't send this," he said slowly.

"What," Lavinia said flatly. "Zarek, this had better not be a joke."

Ral shook his head minutely, both hope and fear flaring simultaneously inside him. "Move," he said hoarsely, shoving past her to reach the window. He was barely in time—the bolt of lightning tore out of his right hand and through the open window with a loud thunderclap, singeing the building across the street. Ral leaned against the window for a moment, swearing under his breath. Then he turned back to Lavinia. "I did not send this," he said again. "Fuck, I'll say it in a verity circle if you want."

"That may become necessary," Lavinia responded coolly. "Before all of us go into full panic mode, I would like to check a few things. Please wait outside the office."

"How can you be so fucking calm?" Ral snarled. "The Guildpact is missing, he could be kidnapped, he could be _dea—_ "

Lavinia's jaw jutted out. "I am very much aware, thank you, Guildmage Zarek," she said, and Ral noticed that the pen in her hand was trembling very slightly. "However, I would prefer not to precipitate a citywide panic if possible, especially if it turns out this is all a simple miscommunication."

Ral, who would be perfectly happy to precipitate a citywide panic if it meant getting Jace back alive and in one piece, made an angry noise, swung around, and marched out of the office, before he could lose control of himself again. Once outside, he began to pace back and forth, trying to decide if he should wait for whatever Lavinia was planning to do, or if he should just cut out the middleman. Whatever the Azorius arrester said, the Guildpact was confirmed missing, to Ral's mind.

A hand touched his shoulder, and he whirled round to see a beautiful elf in white and green robes, with the Selesyan tree embroidered on her chest. The emblem made him step back instinctively as he looked her up and down suspiciously. She seemed vaguely familiar, but he couldn't place her.

"What are you doing in Jace's cloak?" she demanded.

He'd forgotten he was still wearing it. Well, that explained the soft touch to his shoulder. She had mistaken him for Jace—though, given their respective height difference, Ral was faintly insulted. "Who the fuck are you?" he asked rudely.

She took a step backward, her face freezing into an expression of distaste, which was when he remembered where he'd seen her before. The Selesnyan Maze-runner. Jace's friend, the one whose memory he had wiped. "Where is Jace?" she said, not bothering to answer his question.

"That's what I'd like to know," snapped Ral. The air around him was starting to crackle and snap, but the elf did not appear particularly put off.

"What do you mean?" she asked instead. "Why are you wearing his cloak? You're not being very discreet."

"I mean that Jace is missing," he snarled back and found himself drawing the cloak more tightly around himself instinctively, away from the hand she put out to touch it.

Her face froze as he spoke. "What do you mean?" she asked again.

"Are you fucking stupid?" He didn't have time for this. Lavinia was going to be too slow. He needed his gauntlet back, and he needed some time to think. He'd get Jace back by himself. He shoved past the elf and headed for the exit of New Prahv.

* * *

Jace woke up slowly, squinting against the headache. There was a bright light shining in his eyes, and his stomach felt ready to rebel. He felt cold metal on his wrists and against his neck.

"Living Guildpact," said a voice, tinged and distorted by a strong echo. "I'm glad you're awake."

Jace didn't even bother trying to think of something to say; instead, he reached out with his mind, trying to figure out what was happening. A sudden jolt of pain through his skull dissolved his concentration, and he heard himself cry out.

"Oh good. It seems to be working," said the voice.

"Where am I?" Jace asked, his voice coming out rough and hoarse. Fragments of the evening before were starting to knit themselves together in his head. He'd left Ral sleeping on his desk and started to leave for a drink of water. And there had been pain in his head—he'd tried to planeswalk, but something had stopped him—panic reared up in the wake of that memory, and he tried to reach for the Eternities.

A loud noise went off in his ear, and it was as if a brick wall had gone up. Momentarily stunned, Jace collapsed backwards, another stab of pain shooting through his head.

"I've stopped your teleportation as well," said the voice. "It was reasonably easy to adjust Lightning Bug to compensate."

"What do you want?" Jace managed through the sudden ringing in his ears. Something brushed against his forehead.

There was a sigh. "Honestly, Guildpact, I'm sorry about this. I didn't know that you were—I mean, who'd expect Zarek to be fucking the Guildpact? But I need your help."

"My help," Jace echoed stupidly. "You _kidnapped_ me."

"It was for a good cause. It was for the _best_ cause."

"You know," panted Jace, trying to work his arms out of the restraints, "I don't think I agree."

"You haven't even heard it yet!" The voice turned from almost companionable to dark and wrathful. "I am fucking sick of the fucking dragon controlling the Izzet League. Someone needs to do something about him."

"I am the living incarnation of law and order of the city of Ravnica," Jace said tightly. "It is not my place to meddle in intraguild affairs. Now, I really think you'd better let me go-"

There was a sharp sigh. "I can't do that," the voice said simply. "You're the only one who can work the flux machine—I already tried it on a dozen goblins. And I am sorry. But at this point, letting you go would compromise my whole plan anyway. So I guess I'll just have to go forward with it."

"No," Jace said frantically, not certain what 'going forward with it' meant, but fairly certain he did not want to find out. Why hadn't he lied to her, tried to get more information? "I mean, I'll consider—"

"What happens if I do _this_?"

Lines of pain ran down the scars on Jace's back, and he gasped and for a moment was—

- _pinned on the table with Tezzeret bending over him, the manablade hovering above his back and then slicing downward as he screamed himself hoarse—_

-wracked with a full-body shiver of pain. A soft whimper pulled its way out of his throat without his consent.

"Interesting," the voice continued relentlessly. Jace struggled against his bonds, once more reaching out with his mind—and once again the stab of pain through his temple caught him and dissipated the feeble attempt.

He took a deep, steadying breath through his nose. A gentle touch on his forehead was followed by a stab of pain down the lightning scar on his chest and—

- _Ral's hands on his chest like a lifeline, followed by a surging rush of painful electricity and the absence of a heartbeat becoming a thunderclap in his ears—_

-Jace swallowed against the feeling of needing to throw up.

"The light seems to be disturbing the patterns," mumbled the voice, and there was a moment of hollow silence before Jace felt cloth slide across his eyes and block his view, not that he had been able to see much to begin with. The disappearance of the light should have quieted the headache, but instead it merely left him lost in the darkness, his heart beating thunderously loud in his ears.

"What do you want?" he asked, but that was wrong—he'd already asked that, hadn't he? Something tingled on his forehead, and he realized the flat, plastic disks Ral had taken off last time they'd tested the flux machine had been replaced. There was a low hum as the power running through them intensified, and Jace bucked against his restraints. This didn't feel like the last time. Something was very different, very wrong. His hands clenched and unclenched, but he wasn't trying to move them. He could feel Ral's equations burning at the corners of his mind, but they were backwards, inverted, solution and initial conditions mixed up and turned over.

His mind burning with an internal fire, Jace slipped into darkness.


	17. Chapter 17

**A/N:** In which Ral searches, Emmara helps, and Jace suffers.

 **Chapter Seventeen**

Ral stormed out of the building, heading back toward his lab. The only clue he had was the missing equations, and that was where he was going to start. If anyone could find Jace, it would be him. It would be—

"Guildmage Zarek!" The elf's voice. Ral didn't stop, didn't turn, just kept striding forward. "Zarek!" She caught up with him on the street corner, despite the fact that Ral had deliberately lengthened his stride to outpace her. "Wait!" she said, sounding frustrated.

"No time," Ral responded, almost cheerfully. "Need to get back to my lab and save Ja—the Guildpact."

"And I'd like to help you do that."

"Why?" asked Ral, not slowing his pace.

"Because he's my friend?" She was definitely getting frustrated now. Good. Maybe she would leave. Ral very deliberately did not think about why he was absolutely one hundred percent not interested in getting help from Emmara Tandris.

"Then go find him yourself," he said.

"Zarek, what is wrong with you? Do you not want him to be found?"

That made him stop. Lightning crackled up his spine as he spoke, the joking tone fading from his words. "Whoever kidnapped him better have a good exit strategy, because they're going to die if they can't outrun me," he said, then immediately wished he hadn't.

Emmara's face softened, and she put a hand on his arm. "I don't want to take him away from you," she said.

"I never said you did." He started walking again.

"I just think that two heads are better than one, and I know I won't be able to help the Azorius. I wouldn't fit in with their procedure."

"What makes you think you'd fit in with mine?"

"Better than the two of us working at cross purposes."

This discussion was pointless. If she wanted to keep following him, let her. Having the argument was only slowing him down from reaching Jace. "If I let you into my lab, you don't touch _anything_."

"Very well."

"And you don't say anything while I'm thinking unless I ask you to. If you have a brilliant idea of how to find Jace, then you can waltz off on your pretty little elven feet and do it yourself."

Emmara made an annoyed, skeptical noise, but didn't actually voice an objection. Ral rolled his eyes in frustration as she continued to keep pace with him.

He opened the door of Nivix only to find himself staring at a very irate-looking dragon. "There you are, Zarek," the Firemind said. "I need you to track down the Guildpact."

Ral barely managed to swallow an expression of surprise that might have been fatal. "What?" he compromised on.

"I have just received a message from New Prahv," Niv-Mizzet said. "They have determined that the Guildpact is missing. I want you to find him."

"Really?" Ral said, skeptically, pausing to try and catch his breath surreptitiously. "Weren't you just trying to find us an edge against him?"

A puff of smoke told Ral he was treading in dangerous territory, but Niv-Mizzet answered surprisingly civilly. "And right now, we need him. Things have changed. Now do you think you will be able to repurpose Lightning Bug, or shall I arrange to have you stuffed and then roasted?"

Ral grinned, though the grin was a little forced. "Of course I'll be able to."

"Good," said the dragon grimly. "Then go. Send a goblin to let me know if you need anything."

Ral gave him a quick nod, then swept up the stairs toward his lab three at a time. He still had one ace up his sleeve, as long as the earlier explosion hadn't damaged it, and he was desperate to check.

Flinging himself to the ground in front of the flux machine, he sighed with relief to see that the little light on the very top was still clear, unblinking blue. Thank god he'd made backups. Thank god they were actually intact. He frowned. Now all he had to do was boost the power output of Lightning Bug about five times and somehow calibrate it to these brain patterns. And somehow avoid explaining to Niv-Mizzet why he happened to have the Living Guildpact's brain patterns lying around, but that was of secondary concern until Jace's safety was assured.

"Can I help?"

Ral nearly banged his head into the bottom of the machine as he sat up. "How did you get in here?" he asked Emmara.

"I asked nicely," she said with a somewhat self-satisfied-looking smile. "Now is there anything I can do to help?"

"Do you know how to wire mana-lines together to create a modulative phase net?" She looked nonplussed. Ral sighed. "You can carry things if you want." It would be easier than tripping over her every time he needed a different tool, but he was already missing Jace fiercely. Even without the mind mage in his head, they would already be moving toward a solution. "Well, let's get started," Ral snapped. "We've got a lot of work to do."

* * *

Jace didn't know how long it had been. He couldn't see anything except for shadows moving beyond the blindfold, and attempting to reach out with his mind was blindingly painful, so the most he could gather were shreds and scraps from the minds around him, none of which were coherent or useful.

They had given him water and let him relieve himself, but there had been no food, and Jace had gone long past hunger and into a dull stomachache accompanied by dizziness that told him it must have at least been a few days. Yet he wasn't sure if he had even slept. He seemed to be missing swathes of consciousness, but he couldn't tell if that was from actual sleep, or if it was because of whatever they were doing to his head.

His mental barriers had started to falter three drinks of water ago, and he could feel them slowly rewriting the patterns of his mind. It felt like a slower, more painful version of what had happened when he had changed minds with Kallist. He was at bay in his own mind, running from the assault on his self, but his self was eroding.

"Why is this going so slowly?" a voice asked, perhaps now or hours ago or roiling through Jace's mind before the thought had been converted into speech.

"He's stronger than I expected." Stronger. Strength. Jace needed strength but felt only weakness as he ran from the dark lightning bolts that rewired and remade him. The paths of his mind slipped and slid beneath his mental feet as he ran, trying to find somewhere safe, but the memories behind him fell away as he went.

A soft voice telling him he was safe was there and then gone, leaving only a memory of a memory. A less soft voice, breathing his own name into his ear, hands moving down his side, vanished as he ran. As everything was stripped away at last, the nameless mage found himself in a small bubble of memories left untouched only because it was beyond the comprehension of his attackers.

Floating in a sea of colors, someone's hand grasped in his, he tried to look at his companion, but saw only a human-shaped form made from shifting electricity.

* * *

"So you have no leads either?" Lavinia asked tiredly. She was exhausted, running on perhaps two hours of sleep, snatched frantically between long periods of fruitless searching. Her vision kept blurring with tiredness, and she leaned against the window for stability.

"I am afraid not," Teysa said, her voice clipped and sharp. "Lavinia, you need rest."

"I can't rest," Lavinia responded dully. "The Guildpact is missing. It is my duty to—"

"Collapse in the middle of a climactic chase?" Teysa asked dryly. "You need to have some form of actual sleep, or you won't be any use to the Guildpact. Right now you are not going to be able to find any leads. Now are you going to sleep here, or shall I have a thrull escort you home?"

"I shouldn't even be here," Lavinia said, but she let Teysa take her hand and gently lead her over to the surprisingly plain bed in the corner.

"Now go—" Teysa's next words were drowned by a tremendous thunderclap that nearly scared Lavinia awake. The two of them turned to stare out the window again.

What had been mostly blue skies just a moment or two ago was already clouding over with a vast, slowly-rotating spiral of cloud cover. Flashes of lightning were visible as sudden illuminations from deep within the clouds. Another thunderclap was immediately followed by a low, constant rumbling, almost like one of the rare earthquakes that occasionally struck the district.

Lavinia's fuzzy head was having trouble understanding what she was seeing, and she turned to Teysa, trying to find the word that she was certain was responsible for this. "Zarek," Teysa supplied, one eyebrow quirking upward in interest. "I was wondering what he was doing."

"I still don't have any idea," Lavinia admitted, collapsing onto the bed with a yawn.

"Oh, neither do I," Teysa smiled, leaning down to press a kiss into Lavinia's forehead. "But it's obvious he's doing _something_."

* * *

"Damn," Ral breathed, straining his eyes against the darkness. Lightning Bug had not originally been intended as a locator, and one thing he had not taken into account was the difficulty of seeing it when it pinpointed Jace's location. There would necessarily be some false positives as well, and it was going to be extremely difficult to sort out one from the other, because there was nothing to be done other than to check out each location on foot. But while doing so, it would be all too easy to miss an important signal.

He would have to build another machine dedicated to data collection and synthesis, but that would take a long time. The modification of Lightning Bug had been time-consuming enough, and he had been building off an existing framework. Ral ground his gauntleted hand into his forehead, and for a moment let the storm take him.

Storms were his calm and his refuge, and this one welcomed him with open arms, artificial as it was. The rush of blue and red mana curving down his spine pulled his head back and his arms open, drawing an eager gasp from his lips. The hum of electricity in the air increased as he began to draw it down along with the rain, which washed across his face and neck like the touch of—

Ral's eyes snapped open, and he felt his connection to the storm snap like a too-taut manaline. "Shit," he muttered softly to himself.

"Do you need something else, Guildmage Zarek?" Emmara asked, approaching him from behind.

He very nearly snarled, _I need Jace_ , but managed to turn the statement into an incoherent growl instead. After another moment during which he was sure there were sparks flying from his teeth, he managed to calm himself enough to answer. "I am going to have to build a way to analyze the output of the Lightning Bug device."

"That won't be necessary, Head Researcher," said a booming voice from behind both of them.

Ral's lips quirked slightly at the title as he turned to face the dragon. "Of course I am sure the great Firemind has something we could use," he said, in a tone of voice just deferential enough to avoid Niv-Mizzet's anger.

"Yes," said Niv levelly. "Me."

Ral blinked. "You?"

The great head swiveled slightly to one side. "My perceptions and capacity for analysis of data are far greater than a human's, as I'm certain you are aware, Head Researcher."

"Of course, great Firemind, I simply—"

"And, as I have said, this project is of the utmost importance. Or do you find yourself once again doubting my authority with respect to the Guildpact?"

Ral bowed his head. "Of course not." _Though it would be wonderful if you'd keep thinking that,_ he added mentally. Whatever Niv-Mizzet's opinions on the Living Guildpact sleeping with one of the Izzet mages might be, Ral was happy to remain in ignorance of them. "What is it you suggest, Firemind?"

"I _suggest_ you lead a search party to the locations which I will be happy to relay to you. And I further _suggest_ that you find the Guildpact as quickly as possible."

"If you will allow me, Firemind," Emmara spoke up softly, and the dragon's head turned slightly to fix her with his huge, yellow eyes. "I believe that Guildmage Zarek and I will be able to travel most swiftly together, using the powers of Selesnya. It is also in our interests that nothing untoward should happen to the Living Guildpact."

There was a brief moment of hesitation. Ral could almost see the calculations rapidly cycling through the dragon's head, and, for one sick moment of longing, the thought dragged him back to the week before, seated in front of the chalkboard and jabbing an excited finger at the glowing equations hanging in midair in Jace's sprawling handwriting. "Very well," Niv-Mizzet said, his golden, unreadable eyes flicking back to Ral so suddenly that the lightning mage wondered uncomfortably what the dragon was seeing. "To begin with, I wish you to investigate the signal at the junction of Bane Alley and Knock Street."

"Right away," Ral said, trying not to let the impatience sound in his voice. "Come on, Tandris." Then, because he was annoyed and frustrated and because there was a little niggling voice in the back of his mind screaming about 'being too late', he jumped lightly from the side of Nivix, reached out with his gauntleted arm to draw in the mana he needed to buoy himself up on the storm's wind, and landed gently on the street.

* * *

It was oddly dim, this half-light, and he had the strange sensation of floating. He felt that it ought to be dark, but he could see, though his sight had been reduced to pulsing lines of blue and red in front of him. There was a female figure standing in front of him. "Can you hear me?" she said calmly.

He did not respond immediately, and she moved a hand. One of the rippling lines connecting them shuddered. Someone cried out, hoarse and painful, and then he heard a voice respond, "Yes, I can hear you." It sounded strangely quiet.

"Good," she said. "Raise your right arm." Again, he paused, again the hand gesture. Again, the cry of pain. Slight nausea welled up in his stomach, and this time he was aware of complying with the instruction. He tried to shake his head to clear it, tried to remember what he was doing, but he couldn't. He couldn't move his head either, but he managed to look downward. His own arms and legs, too, were outlined in blue, but lines of red trailed away from inside them, winding away to somewhere behind him that he couldn't see.

"Now. Tell me my name."

His mouth opened. Red and blue pulsed, and he watched the blue lines hover over the woman's head and then delicately worm their way inside. "Maree," he said, after a moment, as the information traveled back up the blue line, drawn and forced along by the dragging red. "Your name is Maree."

"Just the name."

The scream this time hurt his throat, but he still could not feel the pain.


	18. Chapter 18

**A/N:** In which Ral and Emmara search, Jace is lost, and Maree's plan comes to fruition.

 **Chapter Eighteen**

"Well, that was unpleasant," Emmara said from behind Ral. He grunted, spat out some mud, then grunted again, before resisting the urge to make an obscene gesture in the direction of Nivix.

"Clearly, Beleren isn't in there," he said, trying to suppress a coughing fit and failing miserably.

"Agreed," said Emmara, wringing out her dress. "Let's try the next location."

Ral glanced across at her. Her face was set and determined even beneath the smears of mud. Despite the now-draggled nature of her hair and clothes, she was still ethereally lovely. He was suddenly, absurdly conscious of his own half-week's growth of beard and how bloodshot his eyes must be, thanks to running on nothing but coffee and naps for the past three days. Lightning crackled around him for a moment, sputtering out mainly because of the safeguards on his belt rather than an actual, conscious effort on his part to suppress it.

"Are you all right?" Emmara asked, her voice sounding vaguely concerned.

"Hm? Yes," Ral answered, shaking his head. Damn emotions. It was the lack of sleep getting to him, nothing more. He looked up at Nivix, gathered mana, and let loose a single bolt of white lightning into the sky, then waited. Mere seconds later, a new location appeared on his gauntlet. At least the Firemind was efficient, even if Lightning Bug was currently leaving something to be desired.

Which was, of course, yet another thing that was Ral's fault. Squelching along in his muddy boots, he kicked frustratedly at the ground. It felt as if the mud were slowly soaking up from the insides of his soles through his legs and into his stomach. Jace had been taken from inside his office, along with all the information necessary to build another flux machine. While Ral was sleeping there. And now, Lightning Bug was doing a piss-poor job at finding him again, even with the Guildpact's actual brain patterns to use as a homing mechanism.

The Selesnyan elementals grew out of the ground as Emmara gestured, picking Ral up as he walked forward. If it weren't for them, Ral thought mulishly, he wouldn't even be moving at a reasonable pace. Even so, it would take them a solid five or ten minutes to reach the new location.

Ral's mouth opened and words fell out. "How do you know Jace?" That hadn't been what he'd intended to say.

There was a pause, but Emmara answered quite levelly, "I've known him since he was a child—well, a teenager."

How old was she? "Were you two ever—" Ral needed to close his mouth and keep it shut.

There was a tense pause. "Ever what?" Emmara prompted.

Fuck. "Um. You know. Involved."

"He's not really my type," she said lightly. "Why?"

Ral grunted something. He probably should have been relieved, but he had seen the way Jace had looked at Emmara during the Implicit Maze. If they hadn't been a couple, it meant the mind mage might not be over her. Competing with a dream might actually be worse than the alternative. "Dunno, just interested," Ral muttered eventually.

Emmara, perhaps out of politeness, didn't speak again, and Ral managed to keep himself from vomiting up more word bile until they reached their destination. This turned out to be a huge, empty building that had probably been used as an Izzet lecture hall at some point, but was now dark and forbidding. A huge chain on the door was stamped with the Simic crest.

Ral glanced upward. The storm overhead was raging, and he could feel the knot of mana coalescing, but it was weaker than it should be. Lightning Bug might be a prototype, but it shouldn't be this shitty. This was their fourth stop, and at each one, the signal had been too damn weak. Ral ground his teeth. Any moment now, the Firemind was going to contact him and tell him he'd failed and someone else was being put on the project. What the hell was going on?

He stared at the readings on his belt, chewing on his lip. Bad match. The equations could not be wrong—they could not be wrong, dammit! He'd barely changed anything. Had he input something wrong this time? Screwed up the boundary conditions?

"Are we going to check this or just stand around?" Emmara asked, sounding sharper than she had yet.

"Let me _think_ ," snarled Ral, reaching up a hand to yank at his hair in frustration. The first—and strongest—signal had run them into a group of Azorius arresters, including Lavinia, who had given them a tired nod. As they'd left, they had passed the crippled Orzhov envoy, surrounded by thrulls. The second had taken them to outside one of the smaller Simic laboratories, and Ral had been somewhat more hopeful, but there was absolutely no sign of anything like a kidnapped Guildpact. The third signal had been the one above the entrance to the Undercity, where they had nearly drowned in mud before being rescued by some Golgari, who were surprisingly polite.

And every single damn time the signal had peaked when Ral and Emmara arrived.

He stared up at the sky. What was this—wishful thinking? Desire for Jace didn't equal Jace's actual brain patterns. What if he hadn't fucked anything up? If he had, this was entirely useless. Ral tapped angrily at his equipment. Much as he hated to admit it, the Firemind should have caught any obvious errors, and Niv-Mizzet had as much stake as he did in the safe return of the Guildpact—though Ral felt he had something more of a stake in the safe return of Jace Beleren.

So what if the reason he couldn't find a match wasn't because there was anything wrong with the thing doing the matching, but because there was something wrong with the thing he was _trying to match_?

That was it. That was the idea he'd needed. He felt the clouds lift from his mind, heard the external storm intensify as his thoughts began to speed up. Lavinia—himself, Emmara—the Orzhov maze runner—someone from the Simic, the Golgari—the signals they were chasing were the Maze-runners themselves. Not the original Jace, just the echoes of his mind left from the forging of the Guildpact.

But Jace himself should be resonating more strongly than any of them were—unless—

A sudden pain in his hand kicked him away from that line of reasoning. They would know if the Guildpact were broken. They would know if Jace were—

But then how? How could Jace's own brain patterns not be matching with the patterns he had left in the flux machine? Unless they were being suppressed, rewritten, the equations that Jace himself had helped create turned backwards and used against him—

"Ral?" He gasped sharply.

"Yeah. Just. Okay. Give me a minute. I need to—tune in."

"Tune in?" Emmara echoed, but her voice was a faint whisper in the back of his mind as Ral turned his brain inward and reached for the Firemind itself. It sizzled burning across his awareness, and he flinched slightly, shaking himself in irritation. Ral did not like the sensation and would not have used it had he not needed to speak to Niv-Mizzet rather badly.

 _What is it, Zarek? Do you know where the Guildpact is?_

In his head, the dragon's voice was even louder than it was in person. Ral winced. _I know how to find him. We have to stop looking at the individual signals and triangulate them. There should be ten stronger signals and an eleventh that matches each of them. That's where he is._

There was a waiting, considering sort of pause. _Hm,_ rumbled the Firemind. _You'd better be right about this._

 _Would I have signaled you if I weren't?_

The dragon did not respond, but after a moment, Ral felt the heat of Niv-Mizzet's attention turn away from him, as it focused once again onto the storm above the city.

"What's going on?" Emmara asked.

Ral stared at her. Wasn't it obvious? No, she seemed genuinely confused. "The Maze-runners," he said.

"What?"

Oh. Of course. She hadn't been privy to his conversation with Niv. "I just spoke with the Firemind," he said impatiently. "Project Lightning Bug keeps finding the Maze-runners instead of Jace. He drew all our minds together. We still retain an imprint of his mental patterns."

"But surely that should be fainter than his own mind?"

"Yes," Ral agreed grimly. "It should. But it isn't."

His gauntlet beeped once and another location flashed across the screen, one which Ral himself recognized. It was an old tower at the edge of the Tenth District that the Izzet had used for their experiments until a dispute over jurisdiction came up and it was confiscated by the Azorius.

"Come on, let's go," he told Emmara, flashing the location over to her. She nodded tersely, and the elementals rose at her command.

* * *

colors fire and brimstone elements raging heat lightning

fallingFALLINGfalling

pain in his chest pain in his mind pain and companion missing gone

lightning on his tail and chasing it gone hands on thighs and sighs on lips dragon above dragon below

a bright red thread of pain holding and directing, a puppet dancing on the puppeteer's instruction

* * *

The old tower looked just as deserted as it had the last time Ral had come here, sneaking down in the middle of the night to do some quick skyline testing. It hadn't required much stealth, either, once he realized the Azorius guards had given up and gone home at sundown. Now, however, despite the boarded-up windows and the rounded, crumbling stones that made it up, there was something different about it. Ral could feel it in the air—a sharp, alive humming that made the cobblestones sing beneath his feet.

Above them, the storm clouds whirled in a tightening spiral. "Tandris," Ral said.

"Yes?"

"Do you think you can distract whoever's in there?"

" _Is_ there anyone in there?" He gave her a brief, irritated glance, and she held up her hands. "All right. If you're that certain this is the right place, then I'm sure my elementals and I can draw their attention."

"Wonderful," Ral said. "I'll be going then."

"You're not signaling the dragon?"

"I'm sure he'll be here soon enough," shrugged Ral. _And if I don't tell him, maybe I can go in and get Jace out before he notices_.

"All right," Emmara said. "Give me a few minutes to get their attention."

Ral nearly said, "You need more than one?" but decided that there was no point delaying the rescue effort for a single snarky comment. Instead, he merely nodded and headed round to the back of the building, shifting impatiently from foot to foot. When the inevitable angry pounding and generally crashing and ripping noises had been going on for what he judged sufficiently long, he drew down the storm winds and floated himself up to about the third floor. Good thing he'd gone over all the building plans when he was trying to get in the first time.

The section of thin metal wall he hadn't needed to use to enter the last time was there when he tapped at it, and it only took a few minutes with one of his more powerful tools to melt a hole right into the tower and vault in. Good. Now he just needed to find Jace.

Ral cracked his neck and drew a small pouch from his belt. Time to test out another one of his experiments, this one something he had working on since the _last_ disastrous time he lost Jace. He opened the pouch, let the powder inside spill out, and then sent a tiny spark forward to prime it. There was a moment of stillness as the glittering particles hung in the air, and then they exploded outward, tracing along the walls in bright little spirals as they followed the currents of mana in the building. They paused for a moment at a fork in the passage, and then twisted away upwards along the stairs.

Ral heard a shout of surprise from further along the passage, shrugged, and flexed his gauntleted hand with a grim smile. He'd been subtle enough about making his way in here. Subtlety was overrated anyway, and he could feel the storm beating inside him, begging to be let out.

Lightning erupted from the air around him as he began to run down the passageway. This was where they had taken Jace. Ral knew the feeling of being right, and he knew the feeling of dancing along a precipice. And right now both of them were rising inside him.

Rounding the corner, he ran into a group of goblins in Izzet outfits, who had a variety of weapons leveled at him. "Really?" he said aloud, and it was the electricity that answered. The goblins didn't even have a chance to cry out before the lightning surged through all of them, whipping their bodies back into painful bowed arches. Ral stared at their writhing forms coolly, letting the lightning continue for longer than might have been strictly necessary. The odor of cooked flesh followed him as he hurried on down the passage.

Emmara seemed to have done her work well, as he encountered only one further party of guards—easily dispatched—before arriving at a door glowing and swarming with the motes he had released from his pouch. Just one more—

Fuck it. The storm boiled up from behind him where it had been waiting. The screaming winds tore past him and caught at the door—and it belled inward with a creak, straining against its hinges. For a heartbeat longer, it tried to stand against him, but Ral knew that Jace was on the other side of it, and it was just a door. He blew into the room surrounded by gales and crackling clouds.

The storm died as soon as he saw what was inside. One wall of the room was hidden completely beneath a larger version of the flux machine, mountains of blinking lights and manalines hanging from it, tied in neat bundles. And on his knees before it, shirtless, with at least five wires running from his body to the machine, was Jace Beleren. His eyes were shut, his body slumping loosely forward, but the lightning-wound on his chest and his tattoos were glowing a murky red.

"Jace," Ral said hoarsely, hurrying to his side. Most of the manalines were attached via the same plastic disks Ral himself had used, but the thickest ran directly into the base of the Guildpact's spine, the flesh around the entry point puckered and red, weeping clear fluid. "Mother of rains."

His fingers shaking, he detached the disks from Jace's flesh, and each came away with a sickening popping noise. The dim glow surrounding Jace's form did not abate.

"Jace," Ral said again. "Can you hear me?"

The eyes snapped open, and Ral had to slide his eyes away from the bright, scarlet light.

"What the fuck are you doing here?" demanded a familiar voice from behind Ral.

"Evening, Maree," he answered carelessly, not bothering to turn. "Didn't think you had it in you to betray the League."

She made an angry noise. "You fucking asshole. I'm not betraying the League, I'm trying to save it."

"Save it," Ral responded incredulously. "Because kidnapping the Guildpact is definitely the best way to ensure the longevity of your organization."

"I didn't mean to!" Maree protested angrily. "If you hadn't randomly been _fucking_ him, Zarek—I'm just trying to get the League away from that damn lizard! You can help me, or you can fight me. Don't think you'll enjoy it, though."

"You want to do this?" Ral asked, finally rising to his feet and turning around. "You sure?" A single spark sprang from his fingers at his call, hanging in the air for a moment before dissipating.

"I don't need to kill you myself," Maree said in a flat voice. "Beleren, kill him."

"What—" Ral started, and then the pain hit. Lines of color splintered the world in front of his eyes, dragging him into darkness. A hand reached into his chest and cupped around his heart, then slid up through his throat and caught his head as well and squeezed. A sense of pressure and the ringing silence in the air after a thunderclap, but the silence pounded in a staccato arrhythmic pattern, fluttering in his chest like a dozen lightning bugs trying to break free. The hand was in his chest, squeezing, ripping, tearing him apart as he drowned in a strange red mist.

Ral was on the floor, gasping for breath, both hands on his throat. His vision snapped violently back into focus with a twinge of pain in both eyes, heart beating desperately against his chest. The roaring in his ears was still there, and it took him a long moment to realize that it wasn't just in his ears. The storm was raging around him, wind and lightning and rain pelting the platform where he lay, and as he looked up wearily, he saw that the entire roof of the building was gone. The Firemind had arrived.

Maree spat curses in between yelling instructions to Jace, who was floating on a billowing curtain of mana, outlined by the glittering dust that still wafted through the air. The remaining cord had stretched and uncoiled and now swayed gently, tethering him to the machine, which remained intact. Jace still glowed a dull red, and the light reflected off the nearby clouds, turning them the dirty color of old blood.

Ral spat blood and pulled himself wearily to his feet. "Hey Maree!" he shouted. "Do you know what ripping the insides out of your favorite project felt like?" He grinned as she turned to him. "Easy."

The ex-chamberlain's face turned flat and emotionless beneath her lens. "Zarek," she said, and the corners of her mouth turned up very slightly. "Do you know what ripping the mind out of your lover felt like?"

The air itself broke apart and rearranged as Ral's hand went up, but Maree's hand went to her belt, and the lightning bolt fizzled out before it reached her. "Liberating," she grinned, and crimson arced and curled around Ral again.

"Zarek!" roared Niv-Mizzet, and his voice sounded thick and slurred. "Turn off the machine!" Ral glanced upward for a second to see that both of Jace's hands were outstretched, and, outlined in thick, bright dust, there was a tight, swirling coil of mana reaching from them to the dragon's head.

"Ah, fuck," Ral muttered. There was no way Jace was strong enough to take on the Firemind—and yet—the dragon's wingbeats were starting to stutter as he lost altitude, and Ral's dust swirled thicker and darker around the machine and the greedy umbilical cord connecting it and Jace. Ral turned toward the machine—and a heavy blow caught him across the side of his face, snapping his head back and throwing him to the ground.

He cried out in pain, red clouding his vision along one side, but managed to scrabble out of the way as one of Maree's weirds raised its fist to attack again. "Shit fuck balls," Ral spat eloquently. Every muscle in his body was hurting suddenly, and pain was rising behind his eyes even through the adrenaline.

"Give up, Zarek!" Maree called. "The League will rise to true power without the interference of those who followed the dragon!"

"Oh shut _up_ ," Ral groaned, sending a burst of lightning at the weird attacking him, but it burst across the skin and sizzled ineffectually. Ral had to roll hastily to the side again as it swung.

"Zarek!" the Firemind called again, his roar clouded and clotted with pain, and Ral ground his teeth together and tried another bolt. Maybe if he just used _more_ lightning, he could overload its sensors and—

The weird paused for an instant, and Ral felt a moment of hope, and then it stooped forward, the electricity still running across it in little waves, and closed its enormous hand around his throat.

"Hold him still!" Maree called gleefully. "Let him watch like I had to when he destroyed _my_ life's work!"

Ral choked, dragging ineffectually at the hand on his throat. "You're throwing one hell of a tantrum about a weird and one fucking project," he managed.

"You were able to do anything you wanted," she responded calmly. "The dragon never cared. You destroyed _my_ project and then you sabotaged Lightning Bug. And you stole the flux project from me and gave it to the fucking _dragon_."

"I never—ghhhk—sabotaged—"

"I know you did. You did it to protect Beleren, didn't you? Well, fine. See if you can protect him now."

The clouds were so red they were almost burning, and Niv-Mizzet's roar of pain was dwindling into something closer to a shriek, as the dust swirled thicker and faster than ever. Electricity burst around Ral again, so blindingly white he couldn't even see, but it was no good. The weird's grip didn't even falter. He was done. Crushed. Failed. Scratch off one Zarek, unless he—unless he walked.

He could leave. It wouldn't help Jace or Niv, but Ral would survive. He could come back and eliminate Maree. With the element of surprise, he could probably deal with her. He could take the League from her. It could be his.

In that moment, the Eternities lay open before him, and he stared into them for the space of one—two—three heartbeats. Then he sighed, looked up at Jace's thin, hovering form, the scars that he could see as white blurs through the rain, and swore, letting the sudden feeling ebb away. This ended here, or not at all.

A rope of something green and viney appeared in Ral's peripheral vision, and suddenly, the weird was torn away violently backward. Ral coughed and rolled to the side again, then pulled himself to his hands and knees and scrabbled toward the flux machine. He slipped and slid on the wet platform, but he kept going.

Five steps—at each one, he expected to be pulled down and stopped again, but he wasn't. It was almost disappointing how easy it was to reach the machine—which was, of course, when Ral realized that he had no idea how to turn it off safely. It was giving off both mana and heat in thrumming, periodic waves. Just putting his hand near it told him this was a poor choice for the prospects of anyone nearby.

Ral looked at it critically for another moment, then reached out with a grimace and caught at the one remaining line tying it to Jace. Pain seared his hand even through the gauntlet, but he ignored it and tugged. For a moment, it resisted, and then there was a soft pop as the wires parted. The end of the cord hung in the wind and then floated gently toward the earth.

Staring upward, Ral watched as the line of mana between Jace and Niv-Mizzet started to thin and fray, strands of mana snapping off like the threads of a rope. Ral felt his weariness rising up to take him, and he staggered slightly—and the twisting, lazily-moving current of mana running from the machine to Jace increased in speed. More and more threads broke off from the main channel, and there was not enough dust to trace where it was going.

A jolt of pain struck Ral in the forehead, and he felt his vision shiver again, as the sudden ringing silence returned. "Jace—goddammit— _no_ ," he got out through gritted teeth. The pressure was less intense this time, but still enough to force Ral downwards to the wet ground, his knees striking hard enough that there should have been pain, but he couldn't feel it.

Through the rain and the wind and the fragmentation of his vision, he saw Maree stagger across the platform toward him, her hands clutched to her head. Ral managed a grim chuckle as she slipped and fell to the ground. "How does it feel, Maree?" he called out through the pound of blood in his ears. "If I'm going to die, at least I get the pleasure of watching Jace crush your mind first."

There was another figure on the roof, white-clad, also staggering beneath the sudden mental assault. Emmara's elementals were supporting her, but she was bent nearly double as she attempted to make it across the roof. She stopped, throwing her head back, and Ral saw her mouth form the word, 'Jace'. Her voice echoed softly in his ears, clearer than the howling of the thunder and the rain, somehow dropping out of the strange, oppressive silence.

Jace's mouth was open in a silent scream, mana streaming from him in all directions. Ral's eyes flicked to Emmara, then over to Maree, whose voice he heard faintly still repeating, " _fucking_ dragon", then up to Jace.

 _All right_ , Ral told his aching body. _Just one more thing, and then you can collapse. Fuck this._ His right arm was heavy and tingling with pins and needles, and the first time he tried to move it, nothing happened. A second try got the fingers to flex. Finally, shutting his eyes and thinking about nothing else brought it up to head level, and then it was easy. There was mana writhing in the air everywhere, and if there was one thing Ral was good at—

Lightning arced from his fingertips up the trailing current to Jace's back, crawling up the Guildpact's spine and ending in his brain. Ral's body arced back as if he were the one being shocked, lips tugged back in a grimace from around his mouth.

The silence was replaced by soft repetition, one phrase, over and over again, overriding Emmara's voice and Maree's voice and the dragon's roar and the murmur of the voices of the people all around— _kill them._

The lightning drew Ral further inward, as he searched frantically for any touch, any hint, any last little sigh of _Jace Beleren_. He was teetering, losing his footing, on the brink of falling in and losing himself entirely, and still there was nothing but a momentary, fleeting touch of blue, as one small puzzle piece of his mind searched for the matching edge.

He moved by instinct, not by logic, his left hand twitching upward and twisting a second arc of lightning toward Emmara, and he felt a second puzzle piece shudder to life, slotting into place, carrying with it—

-a young boy, bedraggled and confused, staring up at an opening door. With a strange double vision, he could see both the boy, as he looked out of the door, and the white-clad elf, as he looked into it—

-a young man, stinking of alcohol and hopelessness, who slurred and swayed his way to Emmara for her help—

-the memory of the memory of Emmara in bed with another elf, and a whispered confession of love—

His fingertips brushed the cloth of Jace's cloak, and for a moment, he saw the pattern igniting in fire in front of his eyes, the same pattern his instruments had recorded, the same pattern Lightning Bug had followed here, but fragmented and broken and full of holes. "Get the Maze-runners!" he shouted, and though he hadn't taken in the breath to shout, he felt Emmara's understanding blossom inside his head as if it were his own.

Lightning grew almost gently from her fingertips, and it was no longer really lightning, but the mana current arced up and then down and bounced down the side of the building where it crashed into—

-a suspect in a blue cloak and an Azorius arrester, suspiciously eying one another as they both tried to solve a deadly mystery—

-a serial killer who left little presents posed in stone and made both of them cringe over their coffee as they realized sleep would be fleeting for the next few days—

-laughing over some of the daily plaintiffs, also over coffee—

Ral smiled at that one, and Lavinia sent the lightning onward. The strange double memories cascaded through the links, too many and too strong to keep count of anymore, from the hot close mess that was the Rakdos club to the ferociousness of the Gruul playing through Jace's head, even to the pinpricks of pain in his throat and the feeling of his memories beginning to soak out through his blood and into the mouth of the angry vampire. It was the web that had formed the Guildpact, reconstructed in mana and lightning.

The pattern filled in, and Ral pushed through the pulsing anger of _kill them_ , pushed and pushed and pushed, because there was one last memory, one safe space, one thing that Maree might not have been able to touch. With the pattern still sizzling through him, he reached out one last time and into a place that no one else could sense.

In the meaningless chaos that was the echo of the Blind Eternities, Ral's hand caught someone else's. _Come back,_ he whispered. _Jace._ Then, after a pause. _For us. For me._

Another memory. Looking at himself through Jace's eyes, his hair tousled, eyes groggy with sleep, their minds suddenly a strange, mixed-up soup. Jace was him and he was Jace and for one long instant there was nothing but the sudden respite from the nightmares, the calm quiet in the wake of fear and anger. And then he was looking back at the mind mage, whose blue eyes were heartbreakingly empty.

Jace looked at him, the dark forest of the strange plane at his back, and his eyes cleared, and he smiled.

Ral's eyes snapped open in time to see the red light flicker to blue and die, in time to see Niv-Mizzet turn tail and flee. Jace hung for another heartbeat in the air, and then he began to fall. Ral caught at the last fleeing dregs of the mana and Jace's fall slowed as the storm winds swirled around him and then deposited him gently in Ral's arms.

He'd lost weight again. When Jace had disappeared, he had been getting a little soft around the edges, had, in fact, occasionally reminded Ral that he needed to eat. Now his ribs protruded over his shrunken stomach and even his cheekbones were sharp beneath the flesh of his cheeks.

"Goddammit, Jace," Ral said.

Jace's eyelashes fluttered, and his lips curved into something that was almost a smile. "Sorry," he murmured. "Maybe you shouldn't have slept through me being kidnapped." His head slid to the side as his eyes closed, ending up pillowed against Ral's shoulder, and his breathing softened as he slipped into sleep.

Ral slumped over him, pressing his forehead into Jace's. Someone else could deal with—everything else that needed to be dealt with now. Whatever. Fuck it.

Fuck it.


	19. Chapter 19

**A/N:** In which things draw to a close.

Ral's neck ached, and his eyes felt heavy. He blinked them open slowly, and the first thing he saw was a blur of green everywhere. This wasn't his lab. He wasn't at his desk. For one thing, the chair he was slumped in was much more comfortable than any chair he had access to in Nivix. For another, there was a bunch of small flowers that seemed to have taken root in one of the crevices of his gauntlet.

He shifted in the chair as his brain finally managed to place him. The elf's dwelling-place. After the fight at the tower, the Azorius had arrested Maree and her helpers. Ral, who would have preferred to introduce a large quantity of electricity into her system, had been too tired to have another argument, and too worried about the deep sleep Jace seemed to have slipped into.

A hasty conversation between Emmara, Lavinia, and the Orzhov Maze-runner had ended with the decision—made entirely without consulting Ral—to take the Living Guildpact to Emmara's house for safekeeping. They had, of course, allowed Ral to tag along. Very kind of them, he thought bitterly.

Four days later, and Jace had still not woken. Ral rubbed a hand across his unshaven face. It wasn't even stubble anymore, at this point: it had attained scrubby beard status. Ral's voice was hoarse from talking to Jace, and he wasn't even sure why he was bothering. It was pretty clear that Jace's brain was permanently fried. Which meant that everything had been basically pointless. Well. The Guildpact was intact, at least in some kind of way, so maybe other people would call it a success. Ral called it pointless.

A large yellow eye appeared at the window. "Guildmage Zarek, you are to be commended for—"

"Go away," Ral said dully, his eyes barely leaving Jace's empty face. There was a pause.

"A seat on the Izmundi has recently opened up and—"

"I said _fuck off_ ," Ral enunciated clearly, then added, for good measure, "you old bat."

"Hrm," rumbled the dragon, but the eye disappeared.

Ral waited for another five minutes, still staring. Once, he reached out to touch Jace's hand, but stopped himself before he got close enough to touch. Finally, with a sigh, he levered himself out of the chair, holding onto the arm for a moment as a wave of dizziness washed over him and then passed. He wrinkled his nose and sneezed miserably. He needed to breathe some air that wasn't vaguely floral-scented. He slammed the door angrily behind him as he stormed out.

Once he made it to the street, he realized he didn't actually want to go anywhere, paused in indecision, and finally flung himself down onto the sidewalk because the dizziness had come back and his feet were already hurting. Wisps of cloud began to trickle out from beneath his gauntlet, curling upward into the vague semblance of a tiny rain-cloud. "Oh, come on," Ral said in disgust as it started to drizzle onto his head. This hadn't happened in years. Not since he had left the place where he grew up, in fact. _Rain mage_ echoed in his head, but even that memory was not enough to spark his rage into lightning. The anger had drained away, leaving him cold and empty.

Moisture collected on his hair and began to trickle down his face and neck. Staring out through the blurred mist made by the rain made everything seem soft and dull. They would probably have colors again, he supposed. Things usually did. But somehow they seemed even greyer than they had after the events of the Implicit Maze.

The door creaked open behind him, and he heard a light tread behind him. "Guildmage Zarek," the elf said. "Is there a reason you're out here sulking? Jace wants to see you."

"Because I don't want to—" A sudden jolt of adrenaline shot through his stomach, accompanied by a mini lightning strike from the cloud. "What?"

"He woke up just after you went out."

The cloud collapsed with a wet splash, leaving nothing behind but a puddle as it dispersed. Ral blinked against the sudden wash of sunlight in his eyes. "What are you doing out here then?" he demanded.

"I just told you. Jace wants to see you."

"Did you leave him by himself?"

"He's fine, Ral."

"He is _not_ fine! He's—" Ral cut the words off. "Why doesn't he want to see _you_?"

Emmara's eyebrows went up. "I imagine he'd like to see me as well, but I was there when he woke up." Of course she was. The perfect elf. Ral felt his brows coming together in what he knew was an unbecoming and rather petulant scowl, and he opened his mouth to say something that would probably get him slapped, but Emmara spoke again before he could the words out. "Are you jealous, Guildmage?"

Sudden heat spread through Ral's face and across the back of his neck. "Ah—no?"

"It would be rather foolish of you, considering I have already told you that I don't view Jace that way."

"That doesn't mean _he_ doesn't view _you_ —" Ral shut his mouth again. He could already tell that he sounded like an idiot.

"I like to think Jace would respect my wishes," Emmara said sharply. "But let me put it this way, Guildmage Zarek. I don't particularly like you, but you're _not_ a hundred-year-old necromancer who's trying to kill me, so this is a step up from Jace's last choice of a romantic partner. And I'd prefer that not become a pattern, so maybe you could try not completely screwing this one up?"

Ral tried to process this, but his brain was still too exhausted. He settled for saying, "I do not screw things up," and getting slowly to his feet again.

Emmara sighed. "I'll send a servant to get you a towel," she said. "Let's avoid giving Jace pneumonia, shall we?"

Jace didn't realize he'd dozed off again, until he heard someone's voice saying his name, and he blinked his eyes open to see Ral's concerned face bending over him. "Oh, you're back," he said.

"What?" said Ral, clearly taken aback.

Jace yawned, blinking to clear the sleep from his eyes. "You were here just now, I think," he said. "Talking to me. Something about equations of current?"

Something Jace couldn't identify crossed Ral's face, and the mind mage was too tired to exert his powers right now. "You heard that?" Ral asked, his voice oddly soft.

"Sort of?" Jace said. "I've been—drifting in and out." It had been a strange few days. He still wasn't entirely sure his mind was totally knitted back together, but then, he was somewhat used to that feeling. This was certainly no worse than realizing he wasn't Kallist after all—in fact, it was much better in several regards. "But you were here every time," he said, slowly. It was the only constant thing he had in his head—Ral's voice rambling on about nothing in particular, Ral's fingers brushing his palm lightly when no one else was there, as if he didn't want anyone to see.

Ral swallowed, and Jace watched him. "Well," he said, apparently searching for a snarky remark, but all that came out was, "yes." His eyes dropped away from Jace's.

Jace smiled. "Thanks," he said. "It, um. It helped."

"Yeah. No problem."

Jace paused again. "Do you think you make this more awkward?" he asked finally.

That drew Ral's eyes back again. "What?"

"You're trying, I can tell," Jace said. "But I think maybe you could make it more awkward if you tried _really_ hard."

A smile caught at the side of Ral's mouth, and he ran a hand through his hair. "I'm not exactly a gorgeous elf or a hundred-year-old necromancer who still manages to maintain her flawless looks, you know."

Jace reached out and grabbed the hand. "You know," he said. "If I were only attracted to flawless women, I wouldn't have gone to bed with a scruffy Izzet mage."

"And it went so well for you, too."

"Ral—"

"I don't know what you want! I don't know how this happened! I don't know how to deal with—whatever _this_ even is, Beleren. Jace." Tiny sparks danced through Ral's wild hair, and Jace had to laugh, but he sobered quickly.

" _This_ is me saying I like spending time with you when you're doing stupid experiments. And when you're throwing tantrums over the fact those experiments aren't working." Ral opened his mouth, and Jace put a finger on it. The Izzet mage shut up faster than Jace had ever seen him. "Yes, you do throw tantrums. And I think they're actually pretty entertaining to watch. I mean, no, I don't want you to be always throwing tantrums, but—look. I know I—haven't always made the best decisions in a romantic context, and I'm not exactly sure what I'm doing either. But I'd like to see where _this_ goes. And if it goes to you ripping my clothes off and pinning me down in a chair some more—I'm not really going to object to that, to be honest." Ral was leaning forward, but there was still a shade of doubt in his eyes. "Oh, for Krokt's sake—call it an experiment, Ral. Okay? How quickly can you get the Living Guildpact to fall in lo—"

Ral kissed him. Jace's eyes slid shut, breath hitching up in his throat as the flow of words turned into a jumble of noise. Ral's lips on his were warm and desperate, the lightning mage's hand falling up to grasp at the side of Jace's cheek. As Jace started to respond, the lips moved, trailing away and down the side of his mouth, as if Ral couldn't focus on just the one spot. Pinpricks of pain played down Jace's throat as Ral nipped his way down it. A moan spilled out of Jace's throat, and he reached out to drag Ral back up to his mouth.

"Let me kiss you," he managed. "Ral, _please_."

"Well, if you're going to beg," grinned the lightning mage. Jace sighed and leaned forward, catching Ral's lips with his again, his own hand reaching up to grab at Ral's shoulder. Ral rolled onto the bed, legs landing on either side of him, his hands dropping to pin Jace's to the bed, his mouth on Jace's again, their lips moving messily against one another.

As one of Ral's hands slid down Jace's side, he heard the door open quietly, and finally, finally risked sending out a gentle mental probe to see who was there. It was Emmara. _Sorry,_ Jace thought to her.

 _It's all right. I'm glad you're feeling better_. _I'll just let you two have some privacy, shall I?_

 _If you wouldn't mind._

 _Don't worry about the sheets. I'll have one of the servants wash them later_. The door closed again.

Ral sat up, straddling him. "You sent her away."

"You knew she was there?"

"No, I'm deaf."

"Of course I sent her away! Why wouldn't I send her away?"

"Thanks," Ral said, and Jace threw up his hands.

"Are you seriously thanking me for—"

Ral smirked, then ducked forward to kiss him again. "So just how recovered do you feel, Jace?"

* * *

Iskra ducked back into her tent. She had been at the fire, enjoying dinner with the rest of her family, when she thought she'd seen two shadowy figures outlined momentarily against the cloth of the tent. It had better not be some of those cultists again, though she had no idea why they'd want to invade her tent.

She sniffed the air as she entered on tiptoe, catching a hint of crackling ozone—and a hint of something else, too, a smoky aroma that reminded somehow her of the dragon on the temple she had seen weeks ago. Raising the tent-flap high to let in the firelight, she looked around.

The tent was empty. Her pallet still lay where she had left it unrolled in the morning. She ought to have tidied it up, but she'd been too lazy to bother on a day when they weren't traveling, and she'd overslept, in any case. She was certain, though, that she hadn't left any of her belongings on it. Now there was a dark, wrapped bundle lying in the center.

Squinting in the dim light, she called a spark to her hand to illuminate the room as she knelt by the bed. The bundle on the bed was wrapped in rough paper, wet and soaked through with rainwater—but it was bone-dry outside. Frowning in confusion and interest, Iskra peeled the wrapping back. Light glinted off something metal inside, but the first thing she felt was damp cloth.

As the paper came away, she saw that nestled safely inside it was a slim gauntlet with a metal casing fixed to the bottom. In growing excitement, she slid it over her hand and found that it fit snugly. She felt the crackle of dry paper beneath her palm as something inside the gauntlet hummed to life. The hairs stood up on the back of her neck.

As she twitched her nose in excitement, she drew the note from the inside of the gauntlet. The handwriting was crabbed and difficult to read, but after a moment she made it out.

 _Iskra,_

 _Thanks for everything. This device should help you in your future studies. Come find us when you can._

 _R.Z & J.B._


End file.
